This Treatise is printed after the author’s death, as a Memorial by his friends, fellow-students and instructors, with the aid of the Johns Hopkins University. It consists of his Dissertation, reprinted from the copy which was accepted by this University at his examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in June, 1897.
As he had made many notes on the embryology of the Cubomedusæ, and had hoped to complete and publish them together with an account of physiological experiments with these medusæ, he had described the Dissertation on the title-page as Part I, Systematic and Anatomical, and he went to Jamaica immediately after his examination to continue his studies and to procure new material, and he there lost his life.
Franklin Story Conant was born in Boston on September 21, 1870, and he died in Boston on September 13, 1897, a few days after his arrival from Jamaica, where he had contracted yellow fever through self-sacrificing devotion to others.
He was educated in the public schools of New England; at the University of South Carolina; at Williams College, where he received the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1893; and in the Johns Hopkins University, where he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1897, and where he was appointed a Fellow in 1896 and Adam T. Bruce Fellow in 1897.
Most of his instructors have told us that they quickly discovered that Conant was a young man of unusual intelligence and energy and uprightness, and as his education progressed he secured the esteem and the affectionate interest of all who had him in charge, so that they continued to watch his career with increasing pride and satisfaction.
He entered the Johns Hopkins University in the spring of 1894, and at once joined the party of students in zoology who were working, under my direction, in the marine laboratory of the University at Beaufort, North Carolina; and from that time until his death he devoted himself continually, without interruption, to his chosen subject—spending his winters in the laboratory in Baltimore, and devoting his summers to out-of-door studies at Beaufort and at Wood’s Holl, and in Jamaica.
It is as a student and not as an investigator that we most remember Conant, for most of his time was given to reading and study on subjects of general educational value; although he had begun, before his death, to make original contributions to science and to demonstrate his ability to think and work on independent lines.