MEMORIAL OF BASHFORD DEAN 

 1867-1928 



By William K. Gregory 

 GENERAL IMPRESSIONS 



On a certain bright California day in the summer of 1899, I looked out of the window 

 from my table at the Hopkins Marine Laboratory at Pacific Grove and saw Dr. Bashford 

 Dean swinging rapidly up the path leading to the laboratory. A few steps in front of him 

 was a dumpy little Chinese woman, the wife of Ah Tak the fisherman, and from Dean's 

 square shoulder to hers stretched a stout bamboo pole. Between them was slung a large 

 tin can full of water and evidently containing some zoological treasure brought in from 

 the waters of the bay by Ah Tak. 



I rushed out to meet them and assisted in turning the can gently over so that its 

 contents poured slowly into a large wooden trough containing fresh sea water. Then out 

 came a living Silver Shark {Chimaera colUei) glistening in silver and black, waving its 

 gossamer wing-like pectorals and staring vacantly with great round eyes. At that mc 

 ment I caught for the first time a spark from Dean's ardor, which had already sent him 

 into many parts of the world in pursuit of chimaeroid fishes and their development. 

 Nor shall I ever forget his eagerness when the next day I innocently asked him if he had 

 put a fresh Chimaera egg into the same trough with the living Chimaera. He almost 

 leaped down stairs to find the spindle'shaped, dark brown egg which our noble captive 

 had so obligingly laid. And with what joy did he open the egg and find therein a pulsating 

 embryo ! The color drawing that he made upon that occasion, and which now lies before 

 me as I write, immortalizes this priceless embryo and shows us its swelling brain, its 

 red blood vessels, the root-like nutritive outgrowths from its gills, and its gracefully 

 tapering flanks, with all the delicacy and insight for which Dean's drawings were famous. 



The embryology of the cyclostomes, sharks, ganoids and other piscine relics of 

 earlier geologic ages was indeed one of the central themes of Dean's zoological career, 

 but these interests were closely connected with his work on the fossil sharks and 

 armored fishes of the Devonian period. His admirable text-book on "Fishes, Living and 

 Fossil" (1895) illustrates how completely he synthesized the viewpoints of embryology, 

 palaeontology and comparative anatomy, which up to that time had too often been 

 cultivated by separate schools or under opposing leaders. 



As instructor, and later as professor of vertebrate zoology at Columbia University, 

 he left behind him a generation of his old students eager to carry on his work. As curator 

 of recent and fossil fishes at the American Museum of Natural History, he founded and 

 guided successfully an active department of ichthyology, published an important series of 

 memoirs and papers on the sharks and arthrodires of Devonian times and brought to 

 completion a great three volume "Bibliography of Fishes," dealing with living and fossil 



