HYATT, ALPHEUS (1838-1902), American zoologist and palaeontologist, was born at Washington, D.C., on April 5, 1838. From 1858 to 1862 he studied at Harvard, under Louis Agassiz, and in 1863 he served as a volunteer in the Civil War, attaining the rank of captain. In 1867 he was appointed curator of the Essex Institute at Salem, Mass., and in 1870 became professor of zoology and palaeontology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (resigned 1888), and custodian of the Boston Society of Natural History (curator in 1881). In 1886 he was appointed assistant for palaeontology in the Cambridge museum of corn parative anatomy, and in 1889 was attached to the United States Geological Survey as palaeontologist. Hyatt rose to foremost rank among American investigators in the field of invertebrate palaeontology. He was the chief founder of the American Society of Naturalists, of which he acted as first president in 1883, and he also took a leading part in establishing the marine biological laboratories at Annisquam and Woods Hole, Mass. He died at Cambridge, on Jan. 15, 1902.
His works include Observations on Polyzoa (1866) ; Fossil Cephalopods of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (1867) ; Revision of North American Porifera Genera of Fossil Cephalopoda (1883) ; Larval Theory of the Origin of Cellu lar Tissue ; Genesis of the Arietidae ; and Phy logeny of an acquired characteristic (1894) . He wrote the section on Cephalopoda in Karl von Zittel's Palaontologie (1900), and his valuable study on the fossil pond snails of Steinheim ("The Genesis of the Tertiary Species of Planorbis at Steinheim") ap peared in the Memoirs of the Boston Natural History Society in 1880. He was a founder and editor of the American See W. K. Brooks, "Biographical Memoirs of Alpheus Hyatt," Nat. Aced. of Sciences Biog. Mem., vol. vi., pp. 311-325 ; R. T. Jack son, "Alpheus Hyatt and His Principles of Research," Amer. Naturalist, vol. xlvii., pp. 195-205 (Lancester, Pa., 1913) .