Edward Sylvester Morse

Edward Sylvester Morse is a American Naturaliste , born the June 18th 1838 with Portland and dead the December 20th 1925 with Salem.

Its schooling starts badly. It is expelled of the first four schools which it attends and leaves the fifth. He prefers to explore the littoral in the search of wreck or to traverse the countryside to study fauna and the flora there. But its absence of education does not prevent it from having an exemplary life.

Thus, the collection of Shell S which it constitutes during its adolescence, is worth to him very quickly the visit of eminent scientists of Boston, Washington and even of Great Britain.

It specializes in particular on terrestrial snails. It is not twelve years old that it discovers two new species of tiny size: Helix milium and H. astericus . It receives thus the visit of the British Philip Pearsall Carpenter (1819-1877). This one accompanies the young Morse in an exit on the ground with research by shells. Carpenter then recommends it to Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) of the Museum off Comparative Zoology and praises its intellectual qualities and its talents of illustrators.

Agassiz offers to Morse, old then of 21 years, a station of assistant in charge of safeguarding, cataloguing and drawing of the collections of Mollusque S and Brachiopode S. It will then pass all its life between two institutions: Peabody Academy off Science and Essex Institute de Salem. In order to supplement its incomes, Morse gives courses and conferences in various institutions and spends in particular two years to Japan which then seeks to modernize its scientific teaching.

The reputation of Morse is soon firmly established as well in Zoologie as in Ethnologie, in Céramique S Eastern as in Muséologie. He is even the author of a book on the Astronomie where he discusses the possibility of an extraterrestrial life. This autodidact will receive many honorary academic qualifications delivered in particular by Harvard or Yale.

He off publishes in 1864 its first work devoted to molluscs under the title of Observations one the Terrestrial Pulmonifera Maine, Including has off Catalog All the Species off Terrestrial and Fluviatile Mollusca Known to Inhabit the State . In 1870, it makes appear The Brachipoda, has Division off the Annelida where it proposes to detach the Brachiopode S of the molluscs with which these animals were up to that point classified.

In 1877, it leaves for the Japan, a collection of brachiopods, on the coasts, but this visit becomes a three years stay, when one proposes to him a station at the university of Tokyo. It recommends some of its knowledge to help with the starting of the modernization of the era Meiji. It starts the study of Archéologie and Anthropologie in the country and piles up a collection of more than five thousand Japanese potteries. It publishes Japanese homes and then to their surroundings where it presents its work, illustrated by its own drawings. Returned in the USA, he becomes director of Peabody Museum of Salem, of 1880 with 1914, and conservative of the pottery of the Museum off Fine Arts of Boston, where its collection is exposed.

Source

Scott Mr. Martin (1995), Maine' S Early Malacological History. Maine Naturalist , 3 (1): 1-34.

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