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Osborn (HENRY FAIRFIELD an American)

HENRY FAIRFIELD, an American scientist and author. He was born in 1857 at Fairfield, Conn., and after graduating at Princeton in 1877, devoted himself to the study of palæontology. In 1881 he became instructor at Princeton in natural science and two years later professor of anatomy, leaving in 1890 to teach zoölogy at Columbia University. He was twenty years at Columbia, filling the post of dean of natural science part of the time, and that of curator of vertebrate palæontology in the American Museum of Natural History. While engaged in teaching, his research and exploration work widened the field of natural history and his reconstruction of prehistoric mammals drew the attention of scientists all the world over. In 1908 he became president of the board of trustees of the Natural History Museum, and has acted as palæontologist to the geological surveys of the United States and Canada. He was official or president of several societies working in his field, among them the Bison Society, and the Morphological Society. His first published work, which appeared in 1890, was "Evolution and Heredity." Since then he wrote "From the Greeks to Darwin"; "Hereditary Mechanism"; "Evolution of Mammalian Molar Teeth"; "The Age of Mammals"; "Huxley and Education"; "Men of the Stone Age."