BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF ALPHEUS HYATT.* 



ALPHEUS HYATT was born in Washington, D. C., on the 5th 

 of April, 1838, and he died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 

 the 15th of January, 1902, in his sixty-fourth year. His death 

 was sudden, taking place while he was on his way to a meeting 

 of the Boston Society of Natural History, of which he had been 

 for thirty-two years an officer. 



While he was born in Washington, Baltimore was the home of 

 his childhood. It was then and is still the residence of other 

 members of the family. His father's home, an estate known as 

 Wansbeck, was then outside the city, but it is now the Child's 

 Xursery and Hospital of Baltimore, on the corner of Franklin 

 and Shroeder streets. 



When eight years old he was sent away to school, spending 

 only his vacations at home. He soon entered the Maryland Mili- 

 tary Academy, remaining there until, at the age of eighteen, he 

 entered the class of 1860 at Yale. At the end of his first year 

 he was called home to accompany his invalid mother abroad. 

 While at Rome, on this journey, strong influence was brought to 

 bear by his Roman Catholic mother and her spiritual advisers 

 to induce him to devote himself to an ecclesiastical life ; but his 

 mind was fixed upon a scientific career, and at the end of the 

 year abroad he entered the Lawrence Scientific School of Har- 

 vard University to study engineering. He soon fell under the 

 influence of Agassiz, whose enthusiastic inspiration and illus- 

 trious example, together with the encouragement of the devoted 

 young men whom he had drawn about him and the attraction of 

 the museums of Cambridge and Boston, soon stimulated the 

 zeal of Hyatt for pure science, and he abandoned the study of 



* The preparation of this sketch of the life of Alpheus Hyatt has 

 been a labor of love, but I regret that it has fallen to me, for I did 

 not know I was to undertake it until the summer of 1907, and in the 

 meantime, more than five years after his death, three biographies of 

 Hyatt have been written and published by three members of the 

 National Academy whose acquaintance with him was much older and 

 closer than my own. 



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