Alpheus Hyatt. 

 1838-1902. 



Alpheus Hyatt was born in Washington, D. C, April 5, 

 1838, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 15, 

 1902. 



His school life included a course in the Maryland Military 

 Academy and one year in Yale College. After spending a 

 year in Europe he entered the Lawrence Scientific School of 

 Harvard University, being attracted thither by the fame of Louis 

 Agassiz. Here he graduated in 1862 and immediately enlisted 

 as a lieutenant in the U. S. Volunteer Army from which he was 

 mustered out as a captain in the Forty-seventh Massachusetts 

 Regiment. 



After the close of the Civil War, H3'^att returned to Boston 

 and resumed the scientific studies which he pursued with so 

 much vigor and enthusiasm during the rest of his life. Soon 

 afterward he published {jMem. Bos. Soc. Nat. Hist., Vol. I, 

 1866) his first general paper, " On the parallelism between the 

 different stages of life in the individual and those in the entire 

 group of the Molluscous order Tetrabranchiata," which in the 

 title itself expresses the fundamental idea on which all of his 

 many subsequent discussions of the evolution and classification 

 of the Cephalopoda is based. 



In 1867 Hyatt married Miss Ardella Beebe, who with a son 

 and two daughters survives him. In the same year he went to 

 Salem, Mass., w^here with E. S. Morse, A. S. Packard and F. 

 W. Putnam he took an active part in founding the American 

 Naturalist and in organizing the Peabody Academy of Science. 

 His official connection with the Museum work of the Boston 

 Society of Natural History began in 1870, first as Custodian, 

 and afterward as Curator, and continued until his death. He 

 was also for many years professor of zoology and paleontology 

 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, professor of biol- 

 ogy in Boston University, and assistant curator in the Museum 

 of Comparative Zoology. From 1888 he gave a considerable 



389 



Proc. Wash. Acaa. Sci., Februan-, 1504. 



