loz THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SKETCH OF PKOFESSOK EDWAKD S. MORSE. 



PROF. MORSE was born in Portland, Maine, in 183S. He had an 

 early love of natural history, and at thirteen years of age he 

 commenced a collection of shells and minerals. At the outset he made 

 a specialty of shells, and in 1857 gave his first contribution to the 

 Boston Society of Natural History. He attended school in Bethel, 

 Maine, and while following the usual course of an academy took but 

 little interest in the classics, but busied himself with the woods and 

 streams, and during this time added many new and minute species of 

 land-shells to science. 



For several years he followed the profession of mechanical 

 draughtsman in the locomotive-works in Portland ; and he also drew 

 on wood for a while in Boston, thus cultivating that remarkable gift 

 of graphic illustration which has since been of such great use to him 

 both in his scientific work and in his public lectures. In 1852 Mr. 

 Morse became a special student of Prof. Agassiz, at the Museum of 

 Comparative Zoology at Cambridge, where he remained until 1862, 

 pursuing closely his biological work, but also attending the lectures 

 of Wyman, Cook, and Lowell. While with Agassiz he became more 

 especially interested in the study of the Brachiopoda, a class of salt- 

 water bivalve creatures long regarded as mollusks, and of great inter- 

 est in every aspect ; for, although of a low animal type, no other class 

 exhibits such an extensive range in time, geographical distribution, 

 and depth of water. Prof. Morse's first paper on this subject was pub- 

 lished in the " Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, 

 1862." In 1866 he removed to Salem, Massachusetts, where he still 

 resides. Here he became one of the founders of the American Natu- 

 ralist. In 1868 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy 

 of Arts and Sciences, and in 1871 he received the honorary title of 

 Doctor of Philosophy from Bowdoin College, in which institution he 

 was Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy for three years. 

 In 1874 he was elected to one of the university lectureships at Har- 

 vard. In 1876 he became a Fellow of the National Academy of Sci- 

 ences, and the same year was elected Vice-President of the American 

 Association for the Advancement of Science. In the prosecution of 

 his zoological investigations Prof. Morse has made many excursions, 

 visiting the Bay of Fundy several times, and also the Gulf of St. Law- 

 rence, and Beaufort Harbor, North Carolina. Desirous of pushing 

 his observations into regions but little examined, Prof. Morse last 

 year went to Japan, for the purpose of dredging on the coast and 

 searching for new specimens in his favorite lines of research. But 

 the heathen of that remote region had the sagacity to detect the 

 character of their visitor, and quickly secured his services, and set 



