Henry Fairfield Osborn, 1857-1935

Abstract

Professor Henry Fair field Osborn, 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 him self 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 1877. Thence he proceeded to New York, where he studied human anatomy and histology under Professor William H. Welch; and in 1879—80 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 1891. 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.