Obituary. 467 



X^XIX.— Obituary: Prof. O. C. Marsh, Mr. W. E. 

 Brooks, Mr. Joseph Wolf, and Mr. H. B. Hewetson. 



Othniel Charles Marsh. — The excellent piece of work 

 upon the Toothed Birds of the Cretaceous System of Kansas, 

 pul)lished in 1880, has rendered the name of our Foreign 

 Member, Prof. Marsh, well-known to all oruithologists. 

 Othniel Charles Marsh, as we learn from a notice recently 

 published in ^ Nature,^ was born in America in 1831, and 

 was educated at Yale College, though he afterwards studied 

 geology and palaeontology at Berlin, Breslau, and Heidel- 

 berg, and thus widely extended his sphere of knowledge 

 on these subjects. He was appointed to the Chair of 

 Palaeontology in the University of Yale in 1866, and held 

 this important post until his death on the 18th of March 

 last. He was also palaeontologist to the U.S. Geological 

 Snrvey for many years. 



The name of Marsh (along with those of Leidy and Cope) 

 will remain for ever illustrious in the annals of zoology for 

 his long and remarkable series of discoveries in tiie extinct 

 fauna of Western America. Marsh was not only an able 

 writer on this subject, but also a most active and intrepid 

 explorer, and is said to have crossed the Rocky Mountains 

 in pursuit of his scientific work no less than twenty-one 

 times between the years 1869 and 1888. As already stated, 

 his claim to ornithological fame rests upon his monograph 

 of the Odontornithes. In this quarto volume the astonish- 

 ingly perfect skeletons of the extinct birds of the genera 

 Ichthyornis and Hesperornis, which had been exhumed under 

 his care from the Cretaceous beds of Kansas, were admirably 

 floured aud described. 



Marsh was a Fellow of the Geological Society, a Member of 

 the British Association, and a Corresponding Member of the 

 Zoological Society, and was also a frequent visitor to Europe, 

 where he had many friends. He attended the meeting of 

 the International Zoological Congress last year at Cambridge, 



