ALPHEUS HYATT, 1838-1902 145 



Emerson and Holmes among its members; the Examiner's Club com- 

 posed of intellectual and clerical men who met to discuss religious and 

 scientific topics ; The Thursday Club, a social and intellectual organiza- 

 tion; and the Eound Table Club, which was for years presided over by 

 Colonel Thomas W. Higginson and met for the discussion of socio- 

 logical, educational and political subjects. Another organization of 

 intellectual men was known simply as " The Club " and met for discus- 

 sions of many interesting topics at the houses of the various members, 

 all of whom were Cambridge men, such as William James, Horace and 

 Samuel Scudder, Putnam, Trowbridge, Gilman, Dr. Hildreth, Thorn- 

 dike and Justin Winsor. 



Hyatt was keenly appreciative of the natural beauty of the primeval 

 American landscape which man had done so much to desecrate, and 

 he was deeply interested in the conservation of the forests which still 

 clothed our mountainous regions. Thus he was one of the original mem- 

 bers of the Appalachian Club, and served as its president in 1887. 



On January 15, 1902, he died suddenly of gout of the heart while 

 he was standing in Harvard Square intending to leave Cambridge to 

 attend a meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History. As Pro- 

 fessor William H. Dall says in his biography published in 1902 : 



No one who had the privilege of Hyatt's acquaintance but will join in 

 testimony to his high-minded scientific integrity; the infectiousness of his 

 hearty enthusiasm; the fertility of his imagination, which yet was always 

 controlled by constant reference to experience and observation; and the general 

 atmosphere of good-fellowship which he diffused. Unpretentious, open-minded, 

 a constant example of clean living, high thinking and unassuming kindness to 

 all about him, an ideal husband and father, a steadfast friend; we shall not 

 soon look upon his like again. 



He lived in a large wooden house built in the New England Colonial 

 style on Francis Avenue in Cambridge. This place he named " Nor- 

 ton's Wood," for it was adjacent to the forest which still remained upon 

 the old estate of Professor Charles Eliot Norton. The open-handed 

 hospitality of his home was a heritage from his youthful years at 

 " Wansbeck " in Baltimore, his house being a center for that delightful 

 intellectual social life of the days when Cambridge still retained its 

 traditions as a college town apart from the overwhelming influence of 

 Boston. None of his three children sought to follow him in the study 

 of science, although it may be of interest to observe that both of his 

 daughters became sculptors, the scientific accuracy of their work being 

 remarkable even apart from its artistic merit. 



After his death, biographies were written by C. E. Beecher in the 

 American Journal of Science, W. 0. Crosby in the Bulletin of the Geo- 

 logical Society of America, Samuel Henshaw in Science, William H. Dall 

 in The Populae Science Monthly, and the Boston Society of Natural 

 History published an account of the proceedings of its Hyatt Memorial 



