A century of science in America

by Unknown

1870–1880.

The seventh decade was productive of comparatively few great names in the history of our science, but two, J. A. Ryder and Samuel W. Williston, being notable contributors. The former produced but few papers and those between 1877 and 1892, yet they were of note and such was their influence that he is named with Hyatt, Packard, and Cope as one of the founders of the Neo-Lamarckian School of evolutionists in America. Ryder was a particular friend and a colleague of Cope, as they were both concerned with the back-boned animals, while the other two were invertebratists. Ryder wrote on mechanical genesis of tooth forms and on scales of fishes, also on the morphology and evolution of the tails of fishes, cetaceans, and sirenians, and of the other fins of aquatic types. He did, on the other hand, practically no systematic or descriptive work.

Williston, on the contrary, has had a long and varied career as an investigator and as an educator. Trained at Yale, he prepared for medicine, and much of his teaching has been of human anatomy, both at Yale and at the University of Kansas where he served for a number of years as dean of the Medical School. He is also a student of flies, and as such not only the foremost but indeed almost the only dipterologist in the United States. But it is with his work as a vertebrate paleontologist that we are chiefly concerned, and here again he stands among the foremost. His initial work and training in this department of science were with Marsh, for whom he spent many months in field work, collecting largely in the Niobrara Cretaceous of Kansas. He did, however, no research while with Marsh, owing to the latter’s disinclination to foster such work on the part of his associates. Williston began his publications in 1878 and has continued them until the present, working mainly with Cretaceous mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterodactyls. Of late, since his transference to the University of Chicago, where as professor of paleontology and director of the Walker Museum he has served since 1902, his interest has lain mainly among the Paleozoic reptiles and amphibia. Williston’s more notable works are American Permian Vertebrates and Water Reptiles of the Past and Present, wherein he sets forth his views of the phylogenesis and taxonomy of the reptilian class. He is at present at work on the evolution of the reptiles, a volume which is eagerly awaited by his colleagues. It is in morphology that Williston’s greatest strength lies and some of his most effective work on the mosasaurs has appeared in the Journal.

1880–1900.

The next decade, that of 1880–1890, saw a number of notable additions to the workers in vertebrate paleontology: Henry F. Osborn, W. B. Scott, R. W. Shufeldt, J. L. Wortman, George Baur, F. A. Lucas, and F. W. True. Shufeldt is our highest authority on the osteology of birds, both recent and extinct, having recently described all of the extinct forms contained in the Marsh collection; True wrote of Cetacea; Lucas of marine and Pleistocene mammals and birds, and has also written popular books on prehistoric life. Lucas’s greatest service, however, lies in the museums, where he has manifested a genius second to none in the installation of mute evidences of living and past organisms. Wortman was for a time associated with Cope, later with Osborn in the American Museum, again at the Carnegie Museum at Pittsburgh, and finally at Yale in research on the Bridger Eocene portion of the Marsh collection. His work has been chiefly the perfection of field methods in vertebrate paleontology, and as a special investigator of Tertiary Mammalia, treating the latter largely from the morphologic and taxonomic standpoints. Wortman’s Yale results on the carnivores and primates of the Eocene, as yet unfinished, were published in the Journal in 1901–1904.

William B. Scott is a graduate of Princeton, and has spent thirty-four years in her service as Blair Professor of Geology and Paleontology. His first publication, in 1878, issued in conjunction with Osborn and Speir, described material collected by them in the Eocene formations of the West, and since that time Scott’s research has been entirely with the mammals, on which he is one of our highest authorities. His most notable works have been a History of Land Mammals of the Western Hemisphere, 1913, and the results of the Patagonian expeditions by Hatcher, which are published in a quarto series in conjunction with W. J. Sinclair, although they are the authors of separate volumes, Scott’s work being mainly on the carnivores and edentates of the Santa Cruz formation. It is as a systematist in research and as an educator that Scott has attained his highest usefulness.

The man who, next to the three pioneers, has attained the highest reputation in vertebrate paleontologic research, is Henry Fairfield Osborn. Graduate of Princeton in the same class that produced Scott, Osborn served for a time as professor of comparative anatomy in that institution, and in 1891 was called to New York to organize the department of zoology in Columbia University and that of vertebrate paleontology in the American Museum of Natural History. He had, early in his career, gone west in company with Professor Scott, and had collected material from the Eocene formation of Wyoming, upon which they based their first joint paper in 1878, Osborn’s first independent production, a memoir on two genera of Dinocerata, appearing in 1881. A number of papers followed, on the Mesozoic Mammalia, on Cope’s tritubercular theory, and on certain apparent evidences for the transmission of acquired characters. It was, however, with his acceptance of the New York responsibilities, especially at the American Museum, that Osborn’s most significant work began. Aided first by Wortman and Earle, later by W. D. Matthew and others, he has built up the greatest and most complete collection of fossil vertebrates extant; its value, however, was largely enhanced through the purchase of the private collection of Professor Cope, which of course included a large number of types. The American Museum collection thus contains not only a vast series of representative specimens from every class and order of vertebrates, secured by purchase or expedition from nearly all the great localities of the world, but an exhibition series of skulls and partial and entire skeletons and restorations which no other institution can hope to equal. Based upon this wonderful material is a large amount of research, filling many volumes, published for the greater part in the bulletin and memoirs of the Museum. This research is not only the product of the staff, including Walter Granger, Barnum Brown, W. D. Matthew, and W. K. Gregory, but also of a number of other American and some foreign paleontologists as well.

Professor Osborn’s own work has been voluminous, his bibliography from 1877 to 1916 containing no fewer than 441 titles, ranging over the fields of paleontology,—which of course includes the greater number—geology, correlation and paleogeography, evolutionary principles exemplified in the Mammalia, man, neurology and embryology, biographies, and the theory of education.

In paleontology, Osborn’s researches have been largely with the Reptilia and Mammalia, partly morphological, but also taxonomic and evolutional. Faunistic studies have also been made of the mammals. Of his published volumes the most important are, first, the Age of Mammals (1910), in which he treats not of evolutionary series of phylogenies, but of faunas and their origin, migrations, and extinctions, and of the correlation of Old and New World Tertiary deposits and their contents. Men of the Old Stone Age (1916) is an exhaustive treatise and is the first full and authoritative American presentation of what has been discovered up to the present time throughout the world in regard to human prehistory. In his latest volume, The Origin and Evolution of Life (1917), Osborn presents a new energy conception of evolution and heredity as against the prevailing matter and form conceptions. In this volume there is summed up the whole story of the origin and evolution of life on earth up to the appearance of man. This last book is novel in its conceptions, but it is too early as yet to judge of the acceptance of Osborn’s theses by his fellow workers in science.

Since the death of Professor Marsh, Osborn has served as vertebrate paleontologist to the United States Geological Survey, and has in charge the carrying through to completion of the many monographs proposed by his distinguished predecessor. One of these, that on the horned dinosaurs, has been completed by Hatcher and Lull (1907), another on the stegosaurian dinosaurs has been carried forward by C. W. Gilmore of the United States National Museum, while under Osborn’s own hand are the memoirs on the titanotheres (aided by W. K. Gregory), the horses, and the sauropod dinosaurs. Of these, the first, when it shall have been completed, promises to be the most monumental and exhaustive study of a group of fossil organisms ever undertaken.