414 Charles Emerson Beecher. 



As a friend lie was loyal and trustworthy, and 



his memory will always be cherished by his associates in the 

 Sheffield Scientific School with a full realization of the great 

 loss they have sustained in his removal from their midst, and 

 with an equal realization of the great loss to the institution to 

 which he was so ardently devoted and in the future of which 

 he had such great confidence." 



Beecher received the degree of Ph.D. from Yale in 1889, 

 his thesis being a memoir on the Ordovician Brachiospongidse. 

 In 1899 he was elected a member of the National Academy of 

 Sciences, a foreign correspondent of the Geological Society of 

 London, and a fellow of the G-eological Society of America. 

 In 1900 he was elected President of the Connecticut Academy 

 of Arts and Sciences, and filled this office for two years. He 

 was also a member of the American Association of Concholo- 

 gists, Geological Society of Washington, Boston Society of 

 Natural History, and Malacological Society of London. 



Beecher's first paleontologic paper was published by the 

 Geological Survey of Pennsylvania in 1884, when he was 

 twenty-eight years old. It treated of new genera and species 

 of Phyllocarida from the Devonian, a group of rare Crustacea, 

 most of which he had found about his home. He was always 

 on the lookout for these rare fossils, and after securing many 

 hundred additional specimens, he again returned to the subject, 

 and in 1902, in a paper published by the Geological Society of 

 London, embodied all that is known of the Upper Devonian 

 Phyllocarida of Pennsylvania. 



If, during the past ten years, Beecher's time had not been so 

 much taken up with trilobites, he probably would have worked 

 out a phylogenetic classification of the corals. In 1891 he pub- 

 lished two important papers on paleozoic corals, one based on 

 Pleurodictyum lenticular e and the other on Michelinia con- 

 vexa. He concluded that poriferous corals begin with a simple 

 cyathiform corallite, without mural pores, and with septa first 

 appearing toward the end of this stage. These features " indi- 

 cate a primitive, simple, and imperforate ancestry for the Per- 

 forata." The next stage is suggestive of Aidopora, and the 

 final stage in P. lenticulare has at least seven mural pores open- 



