Samuel Cabot

Samuel Cabot III (September 20, 1815 – April 13, 1885) was an American physician, surgeon, and ornithologist, as well as a member of the wealthy and prominent Cabot family.

Early life Samuel Cabot III was born in Boston, Massachusetts on September 20, 1815, to Samuel Cabot Jr. and Elizabeth Cabot (née Perkins). His father, Samuel Cabot Jr. and his grandfather, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, were two of the wealthiest men in 19th-century Boston. Among his brothers were the lawyer, philosopher, and author James Elliot Cabot and the architect and artist Edward Clarke Cabot.

Cabot attended Boston Latin School as a child, and received a A.B. from Harvard University in 1836, followed by an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1839. (Cabot was one of the first doctors in America to perform this operation.) While he was in Paris, he urged James to send him as many bird skins as possible, since American birds were in high demand among European collectors and he could trade them for European and Asian species to expand his own collection. It later passed to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, where the type specimens of ten taxa of Yucatan birds first described by Cabot still survive.

Three birds were named in Cabot's honor by his contemporaries or later: Coereba flaveola caboti (now considered a subspecies of Bananaquit), first described in 1873 as Certhiola caboti by Spencer Baird, on the basis of a specimen collected by Cabot on Cozumel island, off the coast of Yucatan. Colinus nigrogularis caboti (a subspecies of the Yucatan bobwhite), named after Cabot in 1941 from studies he made of it a century earlier in the Yucatán Peninsula.

In addition, a tern collected in Yucatán and first described by Cabot in 1847 as Sterna acuflavida is known in English as Cabot's tern. , it is considered a full species (Thalasseus acuflavidus) by the International Ornithological Congress, although some other authorities treat it as a subspecies of the Sandwich tern (Thalasseus sandvicensis acuflavidus).

Personal life Cabot was an abolitionist who served as secretary for the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which worked to stop the spread of slavery by sending anti-slavery settlers to the Kansas Territory in the wake of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.

In 1844, Cabot married Hannah Lowell Jackson (1820–1879). Together, they had nine children (one of whom died in infancy), including artist Lilla Cabot Perry (born 1848), chemist Samuel Cabot IV (born 1850), surgeon Arthur Tracy Cabot (born 1852), and industrialist Godfrey Lowell Cabot (born 1861).