SKETCH OF PROFESSOR ALPHETJS HYATT, 261 

 SKETCH OF PROFESSOK ALPHEUS HYATT. 



By KALPH S. take. 



PROFESSOR HYATT was born April 5, 1838, in Washington, 

 D. C. He attended various schools, among them the Maryland 

 Military Academy, then under the direction of Captain Allen, an ex- 

 officer of the regular army, an old-fashioned teacher, and somewhat 

 of a naturalist. He entered the class of 1860 in Yale College, but 

 after the Freshman year he left the institution to travel for a year 

 in Europe. Returning, he entered the Lawrence Scientific School 

 at Cambridge in 1858, where he took the highest degree, under 

 Agassiz, in 1862. 



His parents intended that he should become a merchant ; but this 

 was not congenial to the youth's natural tastes, and it was considered 

 the next best course for him to study law. After pursuing for nearly 

 two years studies which were distasteful to him, he finally broke away 

 from college and went to Europe. Upon his return he determined 

 to learn engineering. Thinking that a course in geology would be an 

 excellent introduction to this branch, and attracted by the great name 

 of Agassiz, he began to study that science at the Lawrence Scientific 

 School. Wliile at Cambridge, being attracted by a fine collection 

 of Ammonites, he asked permission to study them, and, after gradua- 

 tion, published a monograph upon them. After a period of service 

 as captain in the army he renewed his studies under Agassiz, in a 

 class which included such students, since become eminent naturalists, 

 as A. E. Verrill, A. S. Packard, N. S. Shaler, S. H. Scudder, F. W. 

 Putnam, E. S. Morse, A. Agassiz, Theodore Lyman, J. A. Allen, and 

 A. S. Bickmore. He afterward went to Salem, where Putnam was 

 curator in the Essex Institute, and in 1867 became one of the curators. 

 Morse and Packard afterward came in, and the four founded and 

 for some years edited the " American Naturalist," which is now pub- 

 lished in Philadelphia. These same young naturalists were also in- 

 strumental, together with officers of the Essex Institute, in founding 

 the Peabody Academy of Sciences at Salem. They formed the first 

 scientific staff, and together planned the museum, in which Professor 

 Hyatt was appointed a curator in 1869. In the year 1871 Professor 

 Hyatt was elected Custodian of the Boston Society of Natural History, 

 and in 1872 he went to Europe, with his family, to finish the studies 

 on Ammonites which he had begun in the Museum of Comparative 

 Zoology in 1861. In 1881 he was elected Curator of the Boston So- 

 ciety. In addition to this he is unofficially in charge of the fossil 

 cephalopods of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge, 

 and is Professor of Zoology and Paleontology in the Massachusetts 

 Institute of Technology. He also has a class from Boston University, 



