Richard Rathbun. 757 



RICHARD RATHBUN AND HIS CONTRIBUTIONS 

 TO ZOOLOGY. 



In the October number of the Journal (page 620) men- 

 tion was made of the death of Dr. Richard Rathbun, 

 Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and 

 for nearly twenty years in charge of the United States 

 National Museum. 



Dr. Rathbun states in a brief autobiography which has 

 kindly been placed in the hands of the writer that his 

 interest in science dated from 1868 when, at the age of 

 sixteen years, he was attracted by the fossils in the 

 quarries near Buffalo, New York, in which he was 

 employed as financial clerk and overseer of work. Fasci- 

 nated by the glimpses of the ancient life of the world as 

 revealed in Hugh Miller's "The Old Red Sandstone,' ' 

 young Rathbun set about the collection and study of the 

 Silurian fossils occurring in the sandstones and lime- 

 stones at Medina, Albion and Lockport, New York. 



In these early years, before he was nineteen years of 

 age, he founded the collection of paleontology in the 

 museum of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, and 

 was appointed curator of that section of the museum. 

 At the age of nineteen Rathbun entered Cornell Univer- 

 sity and continued his paleontological studies under the 

 direction of Charles Fred Hartt. Here he remained for 

 two years, devoting himself largely to the study of a 

 collection of Devonian and Cretaceous Brachiopods 

 and Lamellibranchs from Brazil. The results of these 

 studies are embodied in Rathbun 's earliest scientific 

 papers. 



The first of these, on the Devonian Brachiopoda of 

 Erere, province of Para, Brazil, was completed at Albany 

 with the assistance of Professor James Hall and pub- 

 lished in the Bulletin of the Buffalo Society of Natural 

 Sciences. 1 ' In this paper occur careful descriptions and 

 illustrations of fifteen new species, while the remaining 

 eight species of the collection are referred to previously 

 described forms from North America. This paper was 

 revised and elaborated four years later 2 to include the 



1 Eef erences to bibliography are placed at the end of the paper. 



Am. Jour. Sct.— Fourth Series, Vol. XLVT, No. 276. — December, 1918. 

 37 



