Biographical Sketch of the Late L. P. Gratacap 



By GEORGE FREDERICK K U N Z 



President of the New York Mineralogical Club 



THE late curator of mineralogy at 

 the American Museum of Natural 

 History, Mr. Louis Pope Gratacap, 

 was born at Gowanus, Long Island, on No- 

 vember 1, 1851. He was of English and 

 French ancestry. He received his education 

 in the schools of New York City and was 

 graduated in 1869 from the College of the 

 City of New York. After a year in the 

 General Theological Seminary, he entered 

 the Columbia School of Mines, from which 

 he was graduated in 1876. Thereafter he 

 devoted his life to scientific and literary 

 pursuits. He came to the American Mu- 

 seum of Natural History (then in the Ar- 

 senal Building in Central Park) in 1876, and 

 was appointed assistant curator in mineral- 

 ogy in 1880, curator of the department of 

 mineralogy in 1909, and curator of Mollusca 

 in the same year. He was a fellow of the 

 American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science and a member of the Society of 

 Naturalists of New York City, as well as 

 assistant general of the Natural Science 

 Association of Staten Island. 



In the death of Mr. Gratacap, on Decem- 

 ber 19, 1917, the American Museum of 

 Natural History lost one of its most valued 

 officers. Earnestly devoted to the study of 

 mineralogy, Mr. Gratacap combined to an 

 unusual degree a knowledge of minerals with 

 a happy faculty of making this knowledge 

 available for the benefit of the many stu- 

 dents attracted to the Museum by its splen- 

 did collections. The work he accomplished 

 in the cause of public education and in the 

 diffusion of a love for mineralogy scarcely 

 can be overestimated. 



]Mr. Gratacap was a pupil of Dr. Thomas 

 Egleston i- — one of his most notable students. 

 He was preeminently a "curator," and the 



' Dr. Thomas Egleston was professor of min- 

 eralogy at Columbia University and founder of 

 the School of Mines of that institution opened 

 in 1864. He was an American but had studied 

 in the Ecole des Mines of Paris. He elaborated 

 for the New York school the system of installation 

 of collections which existed in the Ecole des Mines. 

 The impress of Dr. Egleston's work is distinguish- 

 able in many of the museums throughout the 

 United States, whose curators had been students 

 under him. 



302 



mineralogical and precious stone collection of 

 the American Museum of Natural History, 

 as it stands today, is probably the best dis- 

 played collection in this country or abroad. 

 It is remarkable for its absolute cleanliness 

 and for its labeling, and for the evidence 

 of great attention given to specimens. Min- 

 erals require care not necessary in the case 

 of many other exhibits, for a single hard 

 touch may mean the permanent injury of a 

 specimen and may result in the displacement 

 of a brittle crystal, such as of sulphur, cin- 

 nabar, or wulfenite. With the work that 

 his position involved, much of his time was 

 consumed, preventing him — as has been the 

 case with many other museum curators — 

 from devoting the time to original work that 

 would have been possible if he had assumed 

 charge of a well-established collection rather 

 than of one in its formative period. 



In addition to his special activity as 

 curator, Mr. Gratacap found time to write 

 a great number of valuable papers for sci- 

 entific journals on his favorite subject and 

 to compose several books of sterling merit, 

 in which may be noted a most happy blend- 

 ing of scientific accuracy and wise popu- 

 larity. Examples of the latter are his 

 "Geology of the City of New York" and 

 "Popular Guide to Minerals." Among the 

 many papers contributed to scientific jour- 

 nals, a group devoted to early museums in 

 New York City, and to the rules to be fol- 

 lowed in constructing and arranging a typi- 

 cal nmseum, is especially worthy of atten- 

 tion as embodying the study and experience 

 of one who had large practical knowledge 

 of this subject. 



In his "Formative Museum Period," Mr. 

 Gratacap reminds us that "scientific activity 

 developed more slowly and was less encour- 

 aged in New York in the earlier years of this 

 [last] century than in its neighboring rival 

 cities, Boston and Philadelphia." This he 

 attributes, reasonably enough, to the pre- 

 dominant New Y''ork interest in mercantile 

 pursuits. In the decade prior to the estab- 

 lishment of the American Museum of Nat- 

 ural History, two societies, the New York 

 Academy of Sciences (founded in 1817 and 



