20 Bashford Dean Memorial Volume 



Whatever may have been the circumstances of his meeting with Professor J. S. 

 Newberry, the influence of this man upon Bashford's Dean's life was decisive, for it was 

 Newberry who introduced him to the grand problems of the origin and evolution of the 

 fishes and thus the eager young student of fish culture was started both upon the study of 

 the fossil fishes of the Palaeozoic Era, and upon the pursuit of the embryologic history of 

 their present day relatives, the archaic cyclostomes, sharks and ganoids. And here again 

 his frequent journeys in Europe and Japan on these quests gave him many opportunities 

 for the ferreting of old armor from out of the way places. And so well were these 

 opportunities followed up that long before his first professional paper on the subject 

 appeared (1903) his private collection of European and Japanese armor was already worthy 

 of the noble setting that it eventually obtained. 



It was through his presence at Columbia College, as a graduate student and instruc' 

 tor in geology and zoology, that he became associated with Professor Henry Fairfield 

 Osborn in the founding of the department of zoology and in the planning of the labora- 

 tories and lecture rooms. Here Dean's wide experience in the biological laboratories of 

 Europe was joined with Professor Osborn's sagacious foresight of the needs of research 

 workers for private rooms and of students for spacious well equipped laboratories, the 

 results being eminently satisfactory to the many generations of students of the past thirty 

 years who have worked there. Here also Dean's passion for collecting early led to the 

 building up of excellent teaching collections especially the systematic collection of types of 

 fishes and the beautiful anatomical preparations illustrating the courses in general zoology, 

 ichthyology and embryology. He was also highly successful as a "fisher of men." With 

 incomparable art he set forth to his enthusiastic students the beauties of his favorite 

 subjects, the study of the Devonian placoderms and the embryology of their surviving 

 remote relatives, the cyclostomes, sharks and ganoids. One of his men (N. R. Harrington) 

 secured much valuable material of Polypterus in Africa (although at the cost of his own 

 life, a loss that Dean never ceased to regret) ; another (W. E. Kellicott) followed through 

 the development of the vascular system of Ceratodus: a third, (Raymond C. Osburn) 

 produced evidence that was fatal to Gegenbaur's "archipterygial theory" of the origin 

 of the paired limbs of vertebrates; a fourth (L. Hussakof) contributed worthily to the 

 knowledge of the Devonian placoderms; others carried the influence of Dean's unique 

 personality into many other fields of natural science. It was also through his friendship 

 for Professor Osborn that Dean finally became a curator at the American Museum of 

 Natural History. Here he founded an active department of recent and fossil ichthyology, 

 and prepared for pubHcation many of his papers on the Devonian placoderms ; his great 

 three volume "Bibliography of Fishes," which had grown out of his early attempts to 

 compile a bibliography for his own use, was with the aid of several collaborators also 

 published by the Museum during this period. 



The circumstances which led him to shift the main stream of his tireless activities 

 from zoology to the science and art of arms and armor are complex and somewhat obscure. 

 For various reasons, both the demand and the opportunities for further studies on the 



