BEECHER, CHARLES EMERSON Ameri can palaeontologist, was born at Dunkirk, N.Y., on Oct. 9 1856. He graduated at the University of Michigan in 1878, and then became assistant to James Hall in the New York State Museum at Albany. Ten years later he was appointed to the charge of the invertebrate fossils in the Peabody Museum, New Haven, under O. C. Marsh, whom he succeeded in 1899 as curator. Meanwhile in 1889 he received the degree of Ph.D. from Yale university for his memoir on the Brachiospongidae, a remarkable group of Silur ian sponges; later on he did good work among fossil corals, and other groups, being ultimately regarded as a leading authority on fossil crustaceans and brachiopods. His researches on the develop ment of the brachiopods, and on the trilobites Triarthrus and Tri nucleus, were especially noteworthy. In 1892 he was appointed professor of palaeontology in Yale university. He died on Feb. 14, 1904.
Memoir by C. Schuchert in Amer. foam. Science, vol. xvii., June 1904 (with portrait and bibliography) .