1Tn /Iftemoriam. 



JOHN BELL HATCHER. 



It becomes the mournful duty of the editor of the Annals to 

 record the death, on July 3, 1904, of his beloved and trusted 

 associate, Mr. John Bell Hatcher. 



Mr. Hatcher was born at Cooperstown, Brown County, Illinois, 

 on October the nth, 1861. He was the son of John and Margaret 

 C. Hatcher. The family is Virginian in extraction. In his boy- 

 hood his parents removed to Greene County, Iowa, where his 

 father, who with his mother survive him, engaged in agricultural 

 pursuits near the town of Cooper. He received his early education 

 from his father, who in. the winter months combined the work of 

 teaching in the schools with labor upon-his farm. He also attended 

 the public schools of the neighborhood. In the fall of 1880 he 

 entered Grinnell College, Iowa, where he remained for a short 

 time, and then went to Yale College, where he took the degree of 

 Bachelor in Philosophy, in July, 1884. While a student at Yale 

 his natural fondness for scientific pursuits asserted itself strongly, 

 and he attracted the attention of the late Professor Othniel C. 

 Marsh, the celebrated paleontologist, who was at that time the 

 paleontologist of the United States Geological Survey. Professor 

 Marsh, as soon as the young man had received his diploma, com- 

 missioned him to undertake a paleontological investigation in 

 southwestern Nebraska. On his way to his appointed field of 

 labor he spent but two days and a night with his parents. Although 

 he had not revisited his home for three years, and was urged to 

 stay longer, he refused to do so, being filled with the highest 

 enthusiasm for the work to which he had been called. This inci- 

 dent at the very outset of his career casts light upon his character 

 and his subsequent activities, in which, though full of the warmest 

 affection for those who were bound to him by ties of blood and 

 friendship, he never allowed personal pleasure, or comfort, or even 

 the gratification of the most innocent instincts of the heart, to 



