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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XV. No. a73. 



portant object of scientific meetings is to 

 furnish to these men, most of whom are 

 working singly in their schools and com- 

 munities, a stimulus to continue the scien- 

 tific work for which they have been 

 trained, and an opportunity of bringing 

 the results of their study before a sympa- 

 thetic audience. This opportunity, how- 

 ever, can be afforded only by a local meet- 

 ing, and any arrangement of meetings 

 which sacrifices the local gathering to the 

 national meeting will have a disastrous 

 effect on the spread of the scientific temper 

 in the country, becaiise it will necessarily 

 weaken these local scientific centers which, 

 from their number, are quite as important 

 as the more conspicuous and stronger cen- 

 ters of science in our great institutions. 



I may perhaps be permitted to call at- 

 tention to a second matter suggested by 

 the discussion, although it is one in which 

 I am not in any way officially interested. 

 I must own that I look with some concern 

 on the change of the American Association 

 for the Advancement of Science from a 

 general gathering to one composed of pro- 

 fessional scientists. It has always seemed 

 to me that a most important part of the 

 work of this Association has been in serv- 

 ing as a common ground of meeting for 

 the professional scientists and those who, 

 without professional laiowledge, were in- 

 terested in science. Its meetings have 

 served as an important means of communi- 

 cation between the professional scientific 

 world and the community, reaching the 

 community in the best of all ways — 

 through those individuals who, though 

 without special knowledge of science, have 

 yet a personal interest in it. This function 

 certainly ought to be performed by some 

 organization and it will be of no small 

 concern to science if the American Asso- 

 ciation decides to abandon this function. 



E. A. BlEGE. 



Univebsitt of Wisconsin. 



ALPBEV8 HYATT. 



Alpheus Hyatt died suddenly of heart 

 disease at Cambridge, Mass., January 15, 

 1902, a few months before the completion 

 of his sixty-fourth year. 



He was born at Washington, D. C, April 

 5, 1838; prepared for college at the Mary- 

 land Military Academy and passed a single 

 year at Tale College. After a year's travel 

 in Europe, he entered the Lawrence Scien- 

 tific School at Harvard in 1858, graduating 

 with the degree of Bachelor of Science in 

 1862. 



He enlisted in the volunteer militia in 



1862, served for nine months, and at the 

 close of the Civil War was mustered out in 



1863, as Captain of the 47th Massachusetts- 

 Infantry. 



Returning to Cambridge, he resumed his 

 studies under the guidance of Professor 

 Louis Agassiz, the greater part of his time 

 being directed to work upon the fossil 

 Cephalopoda. In 1867 Mr. Hyatt went to 

 Salem, Mass., and was associated with 

 Messrs. Putnam, Packard, and Morse in the 

 care of the natural history collections of 

 the Essex Institute, and of the Peabody 

 Academy of Science, and in the editorial 

 management of the American Naturalist. 

 He remained in Salem until 1870, when, on 

 May 4, he was elected custodian of the 

 Boston Society of Natural History. By 

 yearly choice Mr. Hyatt remained the sci- 

 entific head of the Society until his untime- 

 ly death. 



He held professional chairs in Boston 

 University and in the Massachusetts Insti- 

 tute of Technology, and was at one time or 

 another officially connected with the Muse- 

 um of Comparative Zoology, and the 

 United States Geological Survey. 



Professor Hyatt was a member of the 

 National Academy of Sciences (1875), the 

 American Philosophical Society (1895), the 

 American Academy of Arts and Sciences 

 (1869), and of other leading scientific so- 



