[AxNALS N. Y. Acad. Sci., Vol. XX. No. 9. Part III. pp. 385-398. pi. XVI. 



31 March. 1911] 



BIOGEAPHICAL MEMOIR OF ROBERT PARR WHITFIELD 



By L. p. Gratacap 



Professor R. P. Whitfield was born at Willowvale, N'ew Hartford 

 Township, Oneida Co., Xew York, on May 37, 1828. His parents came 

 from England, where his father had been engaged at spindle-making for 

 himself. His father possessed very considerable mechanical ability, and 

 from him Professor Whitfield inherited his own marked manipulative 

 skill. His early life was not accompanied by those incentives to the 

 study of nature with which so many naturalists begin their careers, nor 

 did he have any advantages of encouragement either in books or in per- 

 sonal intercourse. In fact, the temperament of his father opposed his 

 occasional indulgence in study and exercised a most unfortunate re- 

 pressive influence upon the child's natural tastes. 



Bv a lucky chance, such as often determines the tenor of a life, when 

 a verv small child, scarcely four years old, a nurse girl ministered in an 

 extraordinary way to the impulses of his nature. This untutored, un- 

 trained companion, who filled a humble domestic role, frequently took 

 the young Whitfield and the other children out into the fields and woods 

 at Willowvale, a pleasant mill-site five miles southwest of Utica, and 

 turned their attention to the life and habits of wild animals, plants and 

 insects. This girl, as I have heard Professor Whitfield himself designate 

 her, was a '^born naturalist" ; she was utterly innocent of any book learn- 

 ing, but possessed an intuitive faculty of observation. Every field, each 

 stretch of wood, the fence posts and the quarrs- stones, the common gravel 

 walk and the flowering wayside were full of delight and wonders to this 

 woman. In the absence of any erudition or any terminology, she sup- 

 plied both from the flow of her own invention and the stores of her own 

 experience and study. It was a wholesome delighted interest, na'ive and 

 spontaneous, and she touched a responsive chord in Whitfield's nature. 

 She knew the various caterpillars, had her own names for them, watched 

 their development into butterflies and taught the children the steps of 

 the wonderful change. The decaying logs of the wood gave up their 

 secrets to her prying and watchful curiosity, the flowers were mentally 

 catalogued and the course of the seasons marked bv their unl)roken sue- 

 cession from spring to autumn. How deeply this illiterate instruction 



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