28 PROCEEDIXGS OF THE BALTIMORE MEETING 



Doctor Eastman is one of the few zoologists on this side of the Atlantic 

 who devoted their lives to the stndy of ancient fishes, which, for the rest, 

 concerns not a few of the greatest problems of the vertebrates; and his 

 services to this field will cause his name to be associated with those of 

 Agassiz the elder. Cope, Xewberry, and Leidy. His publications dealing 

 with paleichthyology include over a hundred memoirs, some of which 

 rank among the most scholarly and accurate in their field. 



Doctor Eastman was born at Cedar Eapids, Iowa, on June 5, 1868, son 

 of Austin A'itruvius Eastman and Mary Scoville. He graduated from 

 Harvard in 1891. studied at Johns Hopkins, thereafter in the University 

 of Munich, where he took his doctorate in 1894: he worked with Prof. 

 Karl von Zittel. whose laboratory then attracted a number of young 

 American paleontologists. Here, as Eastman's interests already centered 

 in fossil fishes, he was given the only material for research which the Ger- 

 man university had at hand — a mass of detached teeth of a chalk measure 

 shark — not attractive material, to say the least: but the young investi- 

 gator attacked it with energy and soon gathered the data for a successful 

 thesis. He was next given a post at Harvard, where, in the Museum of 

 Comparative Zoology, under the mantle of Louis Agassiz, he reviewed the 

 collections of early fishes and found much material for ^publication. He 

 soon became interested in the Devonian fossils of the Agassiz collection, 

 which he found shed light on the rich finds from the Middle AVest, then 

 being described by Doctor Xewberry. Eastman's imagination was espe- 

 cially touched by the range and character of "placoderms'' as the domi- 

 nant group of Devonian times, and. like many another worker, he set 

 himself to solve the puzzles of their lines of evolution and of their kin- 

 ship to modern fishes. Hence he sought actively for more extensive and 

 better preserved material on which to base his findings. The best collect- 

 ing ground for these American forms was in Ohio, and throughout this 

 region Eastman soon learned to know the fossil hunters and their collec- 

 tions. His studies on these forms soon spread over wider fields and be- 

 came well-nigh encyclopaedic : he had the entire Devonian fish fauna at 

 his finger-tips, literally : and if Eastman were sought for at this time, he 

 would have been found at the top of the Agassiz Museum, in the center 

 of a labyrinth made up of tiers of great trays of fossils, and the visitor 

 would come away with the impression that there was something almost 

 uncanny in the skill with which Eastman could call up out of the mud- 

 colored shales these primeval creatures, for their memhm disjuncta would 

 come together so distinctly that one could almost picture the fish coming 

 to life in its trav ! 



