HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN

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2 HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN Professor H enry Fairfield O sborn, who died at his home, Castle Rock, Garrison-on-Hudson, N.Y., on 6 November, 1935, was for about half a century one of the most active biologists in North America. He devoted himself especially to vertebrate palaeontology. He organized the collecting, arrangement, and study of the great series of fossil vertebrates in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and left many pupils to continue the various researches which he began. Osborn was born at Fairfield, Connecticut, on 8 August, 1857, and received his scientific training at Princeton College (afterwards University), where he graduated in Thence he proceeded to New York, where he studied human anatomy and histology under Professor William H. Welch ; and in he followed a course in embryology under F. M. Balfour at Cambridge, and attended lectures on comparative anatomy by Huxley in London. He returned to Princeton with a biological fellowship, and in 1881 was appointed Assistant Professor of Natural science. In 1883 he became Professor of Comparative Anatomy, and occupied the chair at Princeton until Under the inspiration of James McCosh at Princeton and F. M. Balfour at Cambridge, Osborn started investigations in psychology and embryology, and published some of his results ; but he and his fellow student W. B. Scott (afterwards Professor of Geology at Princeton) soon became more fascinated by the remarkable discoveries of extinct vertebrates by Cope and Marsh in the rocks of the western United States, and they decided that the study of fossils should be their life-work. During the vacation of 1877, Osborn, Scott, and F. Speir arranged an excursion to Wyoming, where they made a small collection of Tertiary mammalian remains for the Princeton Museum, and in the following year they published a report which included Osborn s first essay in palaeontology. In 1878 the same party returned to Wyoming to continue their collecting, and henceforth Princeton took an active share in researches on extinct vertebrates. In 1891 Osborn removed to New York, where he was appointed Da Costa Professor of Biology in Columbia College (afterwards University), which had just added a new department for biological subjects. At the same time he accepted the curatorship of vertebrate palaeontology

3 68 Obituary Notices in the American Museum of Natural History, which had not previously made a special collection of fossil vertebrates. He soon attracted students, of whom many proceeded to research ; and he organized a museum staff which was able under his guidance to collect fossils in the west and to prepare them for study and exhibition. In earlier years collecting had often been difficult on account of the presence of hostile Indians, and it had not always been possible to study the arrangement of the rocks in which the fossils occurred. Circumstances were now becoming more favourable, and Osborn arranged that his collectors should always pay special attention to the succession of the deposits, so that the relative age of the fossils might be accurately determined. Having ample private means, he joined his wealthy friends in providing adequate funds for these explorations. He also often accompanied the parties to help and encourage them, and he eventually brought together in the Museum a unique series of vertebrate fossils, all accompanied with precise records of geological age and locality. Most of the fossils were mammalian remains from Tertiary formations, and by the year 1900 so many of them had been studied that it was already possible to record their distribution and compare them with corresponding fossils from other parts of the world. After many careful inquiries, Osborn then published a valuable paper on the Correlation between Tertiary Mammal Horizons of Europe and America, which added much to our knowledge and suggested further research. At the same time he concluded that the common ancestors of the Proboscidea, Sirenia, and Hyracoidea would be found in Africa a conclusion which was immediately afterwards confirmed by the discoveries of C. W. Andrews and H. J. L. Beadnell in the Egyptian Fayum. As researches progressed Osborn continued to reconsider his tables of correlation, and in 1910 he brought the subject up to date in his important volume on The Age of Mammals in Europe, Asia, and North America. For a German edition of this work in 1915 he wrote an elaborate Review of the Pleistocene of Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, which was first published by the New York Academy of Sciences. Osborn realized that the American fossil vertebrates could not well be studied alone, but must be directly compared with those of other regions. He accordingly organized several important expeditions to countries outside the United States and Canada. In 1898 the American Museum was represented in the Princeton University s third expedition to Patagonia. In Osborn himself accompanied a party in the Fayum, Egypt. In 1922 he visited central Asia, where American Museum expeditions under Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews had already made important

4 Henry Fairfield, Osborn 69 collections of new fossil vertebrates. In 1935, shortly before his death, he travelled in Scotland to obtain fishes from the Old Red Sandstone. In 1923 an expedition under Dr. Barnum Brown collected fossil mammals in India. In later years Dr. G. G. Simpson explored Patagonia for a similar purpose. Im portant small collections from other parts were also acquired by purchase and exchange. While the collecting was in progress, Osborn and his staff published a long series of descriptive papers on the new fossils chiefly in the Bulletin and Novitates, sometimes in the Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History. Osborn himself dealt especially with the Dinosaurs, Rhinoceroses, Horses, Titanotheres, and Elephants ; but he also published numerous small papers on fossils of other groups. Among Dinosaurs may be recalled the ostrich-like Ornithomimidae, the gigantic carnivorous Tyrannosaurus, the fossilized mummy of Trachodon, and the small Iguanodont Dinosaurs from Mongolia. O f Rhinoceroses he much improved the classification ; and he first described the skull of the gigantic therium from Mongolia. In one large memoir, published by the American Museum in 1918, he summarized our knowledge of the North American fossil Horses. In another great memoir, published in two volumes by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1929, he gave a still more exhaustive account of the Titanotheres, including a notice of those recently discovered in Central Asia. He also wrote several preliminary notes on the fossil Proboscidea, including some on the remarkable shovel-tusked Mastodons which were found by the American Museum parties in the Pliocene rocks of Mongolia. The latter notes were in preparation for an exhaustive memoir on the Proboscidea, which was nearly completed when he died. During his later years Osborn took great interest in the discoveries of fossil man and his implements, which were then rapidly multiplying in the Old World. Cnder the guidance of the original discoverers, he visited most of the localities, and studied the collections which had been made, and he published valuable critical comments on them. He eventually collected his observations in two popular works, Men of the Old Stone Age (1915) and Man Rises to Parnassus (1927), which have appeared in revised editions and have had a very wide circulation. He also edited an English translation of Obermaier s El Hombre Fosil, which was published by the Hispanic Society of America in 1924 under the title Fossil Man in Spain. While occupied with the detailed comparison and technical description of fossils, Osborn was ever intent on the possible discovery of general principles. He recognized the importance of palaeontology in following

5 70 Obituary Notices the course of evolution of living organisms, and he discussed many remarkable examples. Beginning with a historical work, From the Greeks to Darwin (1894), which was reprinted several times and eventually revised, he wrote many papers on the Lamarckian and Darwinian points of view. He noted the insufficiency of the theory of Natural Selection, and emphasized the importance of habits and environment in stimulating evolution. In 1907 he published a volume on the Evolution of Mammalian Molar Teeth to and from the Triangular, in which he elaborated E. D. Cope s theory that all the various forms of mammalian molars were derived from a primitive tritubercular tooth. At the same time he proposed a nomenclature for the tooth-cusps, which has been widely adopted. In later years he demonstrated parallel lines of evolution among the Horses, Rhinoceroses, Titanotheres, and Elephants, and showed that although the general advance in each line of a group was the same, the rate varied. He also formed some other conceptions to which he gave names, but in one of his last works he lamented that they gained no acceptance in the current realm of either biologic or palaeontologic thought. A summary is given in his volume on the Origin and Evolution o f Life on the Theory of Action, Reaction, and Interaction (191 small supplementary papers. From 1900 onwards Osborn was Vertebrate Palaeontologist to the U.S. Geological Survey, and for four years ( ) he also held the same office in the Geological Survey of Canada. In 1906 he was nominated secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, but he declined this administrative post to continue the work in which he was absorbed in New York. In 1901 he had already been elected a trustee and vicepresident of the American Museum of Natural History, and from 1908 until 1933 he was president. In 1910 he retired from his professorship in Columbia University and became Research Professor of Zoology ; he also relinquished his ordinary curatorship to devote as much time as possible to the general affairs of the Museum, which owes its present outstanding position largely to his personal efforts and guidance. He took a prominent part in founding the New York Zoological Society and planning its Zoological Park, and he was president of the Society from 1909 until He was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in A full account of his activities is given in a small volume entitled Fifty-two Tears of Research, Observation, and Publication, , which he published in New York in Osborn had a large circle of devoted friends, and he and Mrs. Osborn were never happier than when entertaining parties at their beautiful home on the wooded heights overlooking the Hudson River at Garrison,

6 Henry Fairfield Osborn 71 a few miles from New York. Mrs. Osborn, who was the daughter of Commander Perry, was deeply interested in the professor s work, and usually accompanied him on his travels. She died in 1930, shortly after publishing a small volume, The Chain of, which popularized the results of some of her husband s researches. Osborn was almost as well known in Britain as in North America, and his kindly personality and intellectual worth made him always a welcome guest in this country. He was awarded the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1918, and was elected a Foreign Member in He was also a Foreign Member of the Linnean, Zoological, and Geological Societies of London, and he received the Wollaston Medal from the latter Society in He was an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Irish Academy. He was also an honorary D.Sc. of Oxford and Sc.D. of Cambridge. A. Smith Woodward.