"Smithsonian Institution Secretary Charles Doolittle Walcott" by Ellis L. Yochelson [book review]
2004; Ottawa Field-Naturalists' Club; Volume: 118; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.22621/cfn.v118i3.50
ISSN0008-3550
Autores Tópico(s)History of Science and Natural History
ResumoThis, the second and final volume of Yochelson's massive "insider" biography (Yochelson retired from the Smithsonian in 1985), is clearly a labour of love.The first volume, Charles Doolittle Walcott, Paleontologist, appeared in 1998.From Walcott's daily diaries, an unusual amount of detail is provided chronologically, month by month, as a record for future historians.Fifty pages describe happenings in 1927 alone, when Walcott was already seventy years old.Charles Doolitte Walcott was a man of humble and inauspicious beginnings, without any opportunity for a college education.In his early twenties he sold a collection of fossils to Louis Agassiz at Harvard University; a few years later he was offered a job as a temporary field assistant, measuring the thickness of rocks in Bryce Canyon, Utah, for the newly formed United States Geological Survey.A man of great tact and wisdom, Walcott never looked back; in 1933 the fifth edition of American Men of Science listed him posthumously as the third most important geological scientist in the country, and he collected twelve honorary degrees from as many universities.Walcott is of enormous importance to Canada.He spent about three months each summer for 18 of 19 years, 1907 through 1925, studying geology and paleontology in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.In Yoho National Park, above Emerald Lake, he discovered the Burgess Shale, rated world-wide by Stephen Jay Gould as "the most precious and important of all fossil localities."In addition to his heavy administrative duties during the remainder of the year, Walcott spent his spare hours in winter studying and describing these fossils.
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