ALPHEUS HYATT : MEMORIAL MEETING. 
421 
thought over the general relations and remote bearings of the facts. 
He kept constantly in mind the ultimate problem of the working 
biologist: How did life-forms originate? 
He was no closet naturalist, but from youth to mature life had a 
wide experience in out-of-door work, or bionomics. He was not a 
mere paleontologist, for he was a good field geologist, and in study¬ 
ing the European ammonites acquired an intimate knowledge of 
the stratigraphy of the ammonite-bearing beds, and of the succes¬ 
sion of species and genera from the lower to the higher strata. 
He was from start to finish a many-sided zoologist, studying the 
embryology and morphology not only of the molluscs but of the 
fresh-water moss-animals (Pol^^zoa). His most important work in 
systematic zoology was in assigning the sponges in 1876 to a 
separate phylum or branch of the animal kingdom, this being the 
outcome of special work not only in their classification but in their 
structure and embryology. Although anticipated by MacAllister in 
referring the sponges to a separate phylum, his own conclusions were 
the result of independent labor. 
The intellectual environment of young Hyatt and others at 
Cambridge early in the sixties was a complicated and somewhat 
perplexing one. Louis Agassiz instilled in the minds of his pupils 
broad ideas, including those underlying the doctrine of trans- 
formism. He earnestly advocated the recapitulation law suggested 
by Meckel, von Baer, and Vogt, giving it much greater exj^ansion 
as the result of his own extensive researches, particularly in the 
direction of geological succession. But here he paused, and it was 
reserved for Fritz Muller, in 1864, and afterwards Haeckel, to add 
the obvious evolutionary bearings of those facts. Jeffries Wyman 
was not inhospitable to the theory of descent. Darwin’s “Origin 
of species” had just appeared, and was the subject of much 
discussion and thought. Haeckel’s “Generelle morphologie ” was 
eagerly read by Hyatt, and proved a stimulus to his thoughts, as 
did Herbert Spencer’s “ Principles of biology,” with its views as to 
the mechanical origin of structures. It was a time of vigorous 
thinking. Young Hyatt, like many another neophyte at that date, 
was buffeted by the most opposing currents of thought, and swayed, 
though perhaps not so greatly influenced, by every wind of doctrine 
— since from the early sixties he pursued the even tenor of his own 
way. He states explicitly that in 1859, or within a year after the 
