ALPHEUS HYATT, 1838-1902 137 



able a teacher as Hyatt should have left so few disciples of his school of 

 research, but it must be remembered that he enjoyed no opportunity to 

 teach the young men who were pursuing the higher courses in zoology 

 at Harvard. Through an unfortunate arrangement those who had 

 charge of the various collections in the Museum of Comparative 

 Zoology were not encouraged to give lectures to students, and they 

 worked on throughout the years, their voices silenced, yet with active 

 young minds eager to listen and to learn always near them. More- 

 over, the spirit of the department of zoology at Harvard during Hyatt's 

 life-time was dominated by Weismannism, and Hyatt's views were thus 

 in disfavor. Upon the rare occasions of his lectures he felt obliged to 

 present not facts — the foundation-stones of his theories — but the theories 

 themselves. Thus the impression grew up that Hyatt was a dreamer 

 and that his theories were based upon erroneous or meager observations. 

 Nothing could have been farther from the truth, for I have myself 

 been surprised, in reading over his publications, to discover that his 

 writings are crowded with accurate observations of indisputable fact, 

 and even if the future should demonstrate that his theoretical deduc- 

 tions are wholly false, he will still be remembered as a great and accu- 

 rate observer of nature. Concerning the truth or falsity of his so-called 

 acceleration or " old age theory " we are obliged to admit that it has 

 never been disproved even if it be not yet accepted as true. Hyatt's 

 fate may be that of Lamarck and of many another theorizer : Apprecia- 

 tion and respect for his views must come only years after his death. 



I will endeavor to give a simple explanation of his theories of evo- 

 lution, avoiding the complex technical terms which he employed. He 

 believed that the race, like the individual, has only a limited store of 

 vitality and that both must develop, progress, decline and die in obe- 

 dience to one and the same law. Thus the growth-stages of the in- 

 dividual actually resemble the stages in the evolution of the race to 

 which it belongs ; as he puts it, " the cycle of ontogeny is an indi- 

 vidual expression and abbreviated recapitulation of the cycle that occurs 

 in the phylogeny of the same stock." " Phylogeny, like ontogeny, is 

 first progressive and thus attains an acme of progress. This acme is 

 followed, however, by a stage of retrogression ending in extinction." 



Hyatt derived his ideas of evolution from a study of the fossil 

 nautiloids and ammonoids, those beautiful chambered shells which 

 appear in the Cambrian; and the ammonoid branch of which becomes 

 extinct in the Cretaceous, while to-day the half-dozen species of Nautilus 

 are all that remain of the nautiloids. He was an ardent student of 

 these fossils, and of the 103 titles in the list of his papers, 38 are upon 

 these shells. He proved that the ammonoids are descended from the 

 nautiloids, for he discovered that the protoconch or primitive shell of 

 the nautiloids is soft and composed of flexible conchiolin so that it is 



VOL. lxxviii. — 10. 



