Alpheus Hyatt

Alpheus Hyatt (April 5, 1838 – January 15, 1902) was an American zoologist and palaeontologist. Hyatt served as the founding president of the American Society of Naturalists from 1883 to 1884 and was the founding editor of the journal The American Naturalist. A student of Louis Agassiz, he was keenly involved in developing biology research and education and helped establish the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.

Biography Alpheus Hyatt II was born in Washington, D.C. to Alpheus Hyatt and Harriet Randolph (King) Hyatt. He briefly attended the Maryland Military Academy and Yale University, and after graduating from Harvard University in 1862, he enlisted as a private in the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry for the Civil War, emerging with the rank of captain.

After the war he worked for a time at the Essex Institute (now the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. He and a colleague founded American Naturalist and Hyatt served as editor from 1867 to 1870. He became a professor of paleontology and zoology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1870, where he taught for eighteen years, and was professor of biology and zoology at Boston University from 1877 until his death in 1902. He also served as curator of the Boston Society of Natural History, where his longtime assistant was his former student Jennie Maria Arms Sheldon, and he established a laboratory at the Norwood-Hyatt House in 1879 for the study of Marine Biology in Annisquam, Massachusetts. The River Road building gave him access to the Annisquam River, a salt water estuary. This enterprise was moved to Woods Hole and became the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in 1888.

Hyatt studied under Louis Agassiz and was a proponent of Neo-Lamarckism with Edward Drinker Cope. In 1869, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him a fellow and in 1875, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1895. In 1898, he received the honorary degree of LL.D. from Brown University.

He and his wife, Audella Beebe, were the parents of famed sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington; their other children were Harriet Randolph Hyatt Mayor, who was a less well known sculptor (and mother of the art historian A. Hyatt Mayor), and Alpheus Hyatt III.

Neo-Lamarckism Hyatt's views on the evolution of species was expressed in his 1866 paper on On the Parallelism between the Different Stages of Life in the Individual and Those in the Entire Group of the Molluscous Order Tetrabranchiata. In this he claimed that extinction of a species was analogous to death of individual organisms. He proposed that there was an acceleration and a deceleration in the number of species over time which preceded extinction. The movement toward this Neo-Lamarckian understanding was supported by Edward Drinker Cope and Alpheus S. Packard. They were joined by Wiilliam H. Dall, Thomas Meehan, Joel A. Allen, Clarence King, Joseph Le Conte, and Henry Fairfield Osborn.

Publications