Elliot Coues

Elliot Coues was born on Septermber 9, 1842 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His father Samuel Elliot Coues was a merchant and worked in the United States Patent Office, which caused him to be away from his family in New Hampshire starting when Coues was eleven. As a child Coues was fascinated by animals and was only interested in books that contained them.. When he moved to be with his father in Washington D.C, Coues went to the Smithsonian and there he met the naturalist Spencer Baird, the first curator of the Smithsonian, who would be his mentor. He published his first technical paper at the age of 19. He attended Gonzaga College High School in Washington D.C. and then Columbia College (which later would be renamed George Washington University) also in Washington D.C. Coues remained at Columbia College for ten years, earning a PhD and an MD.  Coues enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1862 as a medical cadet. In 1863 he was promoted to acting assistant surgeon and in 1864 to assistant surgeon. .

Coues' military career took him all over the United States, with postings in Arizona, North Carolina, California and North Dakota. Coues was an prolific writer and wrote many works on ornithology and natural history. In the Army he got the chance to join expeditions that explored parts of America, serving as both naturalist and surgeon on the United States Northern Boundary Commission form 1873-1876 and from 1876 to 1880 he served as secretary and naturalist to the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. While in the army he authored 300 works and papers. He resigned from the army in 1881 to devote himself more fully to literary and scientific pursuits. After resigning from the Army he returned to Washington D.C. In 1877 he was appointed professor of Anatomy at the National Medical College and that same year he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He was one of the founders of the American Ornithologists Union and served as its president.

Coues' book A Key to North American Birds first edition was published in 1972. The book was at the time  a unique work of ornithology, one which for years other guides to animal species would follow. Other important works by Coues included A Checklist of North American Birds (two editions) and Field Ornithology. Coues identified for the first time many unknown bird species and introduced the trinomial nomenclature used to distinguish subspecies of animals. All living species are known by their scientific name composed of Latin genus and species names. Coues introduced using a third Latin name for subspecies. Coues was also important in mammology, publishing North American Fur Bearing Animals in 1877.

Coues died on December 25, 1899 at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, during an operation to cure an afflicted throat.


References:

Allen, A.J.; "Biographical Memoir of Elliot Coues: 1842-1889"; in Biographical Memoirs Vol 6; National Academy Press; 1909

Anonymous; "A Great Ornithologist"; The Outlook(1900)64:89-90

Elliot, D.G.; "In Memoriam: Elliot Coues"; The Auk(1901)18:1-11

Elliot Coues Wikipedia Entry

William Beebe

Charles William Beebe was born on July 29, 1877 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Charles Beebe, was a paper dealer and was frequently away from home. When Beebe was 2 the family moved to East Orange, New Jersey, away from New York City, which his mother, Henrietta Younglove Beebe, found stifling. The family often took the train into New York City to visit the American Museum of Natural History where they attended lectures. Young Beebe often explored the wilderness around his family home and was an avid collector of animals and insects that he found there. Beebe attended East Orange High School and in 1896 he entered Columbia University in New York City. At Columbia he studied under Henry Osborn. Beebe did not complete his degree at Columbia, finishing all the classes neccessary for a degree except mathematics, and instead he took a job as the assistant curator of ornithology at the new New York Zoological Park, what is now the Bronx Zoo.

As assistant curator Beebe's job was to breed and rear the birds in the zoo's collection. Beebe wanted to give his avian charges the most space possible and so he proposed a "flying cage" the size of a football field, which was built, but only at half the size of his proposal. In 1901 he was part of expedition to Nova Scotia to collect marine animals for the zoo and the following year he was promoted to be a full curator. In 1903 Beebe took an expedition to the Florida keys. Suffering from a throat infection and it was thought that the expedition to the tropics would be beneficial. The expedition fueled Beebe's interest in the wildlife found in the tropics and was the first of many that he would make during his life.

Over the next several years Beebe made many expeditions to collect birds traveling to Mexico, British Guiana, Trinidad, Venezuela, and in 1909 he traveled to the far east on a 17 month expedition, visiting 21 countries and gathering material for a monograph on pheasants. Although the manuscript was completed by 1914, Beebe was fastidious in his desire to have excellent illustrations of the birds. Because of this and the outbreak of World War I the first volume (of four) was not published for 4 more years. In 1915 Beebe traveled to Brazil to obtain more birds for the zoo. The expedition was an important turning point for Beebe as his focus began to change from simply ornithology to studying jungle ecosystems.

After briefly serving as an aviation instructor for the American war effort, in 1918 Beebe began a series of expeditions including the Galapagos islands, the Sargasso Sea, and Haiti. Over the years Beebe's focus widened from just ornithology to study other areas of biology and oceanography. One of Beebe's most important contributions to the study of birds was the theory that the ancestors of modern birds had passed through a stage he referred to as the "tetraptrex" stage where the ancestral birds had four wings on both their fore and hind limbs. This theory was later verified by fossil evidence.

Beebe is probably most famous for his part in the development of the bathysphere. At the time deep sea diving was only possible in heavy and not very movable diving suits. Working with engineer Otis Barton, Beebe developed the bathysphere, an unpowered, spherical shell that was lowered from a ship by means of a cable and ocean life could be viewed through the quartz windows embedded in the side of the sphere. Using the bathysphere they had developed, Beebe and Otis set a world record on a half mile dive in 1934 of off Nonsuch Island in Bermuda. Beebe retired in 1952 at the age of 75.

Beebe died on June 4, 1962 in Simla, India and was buried in Trinidad.


References:

Crandall, Lee S.; "In Memoriam: William Charles Beebe"; The Auk (1964)81:36-42

Gould, Carol Grant; The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist; Island Press; 2004

Hines, Catherine L.; "William Charles Beebe"; 2000

William Beebe Wikipedia Entry