PSYCHE 
VOL. XLI SEPTEMBER 1934 
No. 3 
JOHN MERTON ALDRICH 
By A. L. Melander 
On May 27, 1934, with the passing of John Merton Al- 
drich, the nation’s greatest accumulation of dipterological 
information has ceased to be. Easily the leader in this 
branch of zoology, Aldrich will be missed, and there is no 
one in line who is prepared to continue where he left off. 
At the age of sixty-eight, Aldrich still counted on several 
more years of productive work. His mind was as keen as 
ever, and physically he had no intimation until two weeks 
before the end that an abrupt catabolic derangement was to 
close his life. He had even completed plans to start early in 
June on another of his biennial collecting trips to the Pa- 
cific Coast. 
Aldrich was born on January 28, 1866, in Olmstead 
County, Minnesota. He attended school at Rochester, near 
by, and in 1888 completed the course for the B. A. degree at 
South Dakota State College. In 1889-1890, he studied un- 
der Professor A. J. Cook at the Michigan State College, and 
in 1891 received the degree of M. S. from South Dakota 
State College. Leaving an assistantship at South Dakota in 
1892, he went to the University of Kansas in order to study 
with Professor S. W. Williston, and was awarded another 
degree of M. S. in 1893. 
In 1893 the new University of Idaho opened, and Aldrich 
was selected to found its Department of Zoology. He mar- 
ried Ellen Roe of Brookings, South Dakota, and moved to 
Moscow. The loss of his wife and infant son four years 
later caused him to plunge most deeply into his dipterolog- 
ical work, and he began his card catalogue of the literature 
on Diptera, a project to which he contributed almost daily 
