HY'ATT, ALPltEIIS (1838-11102). An Ameri can naturalist. He was horn at Washington. D. C., and was edneated at the Maryland Mili tary Academy, at Yale College, and the Lawrence Scientific School, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1862. He served as a volunteer throughout the Civil War, rising to the rank of captain. He afterwards renewed his studies, be coming curator of the Essex Institute in 1867. He was the principal founder of the American Society of Naturalists; organized a seaside lab oratory at Amusquam, Mass.; took part in the organization of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood's Holl, Mass.; and assisted in the founding of the Peabody Academy of Sci ences, and became its curator in 1869. He was also one of the founders of the American Naturalist. In 1870 he became custodian, and in 1881 curator, of the Boston Society of Natural History, and in 1881 was appointed professor of zoology and paleontology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Boston University.
He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1875; was a correspond ing member of the Geological Society of London; and in 1898 received the degree of LL.D. from Brown University, and was a vice-president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston. His work as a paleontologist was mas terly; besides making many innovations in the classification of the nautiloids and ammonites (q.v.), the final results form the most valuable contribution to the philosophy of biology. He
was the founder of the new school of invertebrate paleontology. In systematic zo6logy he ;will be remembered for being next to the first one to refer the sponges to a distinct phylum. He also proposed many new genera, families, and numer ous suborders of fossil cephalopods. He dis covered the law of acceleration in the evolution of Cephalopoda, and the mechanical causes of their evolution; of his work on the fossil pond snails of Steinheim and the origin of their vari ous forms. Sir R. Owen wrote that it was "a model of the way and aim in and by which such researches should be conducted." Hyatt wrote, besides many shorter articles: Ob servations on Freshwater Polyzoa (1866) ; Re rision of North American Porifcra (1875.77); "The Genesis of the Tertiary Species of Planorbis at Steinheim," in Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History (1880) ; Genera of Fossil Cephalopods (1883) ; Larral Theory of the Ori gin of Cellular Tissue (1884) ; The Genesis of the Arietidw (1889). He has edited Guides to Science Teaching, and revised the part of the Zittel-Eastman Teat-book of Paleontology on Nautiloids and Ammonoids. These works make him prominent among the new school of Ameri can zotilogists, led by Cope and Packard, which called itself `Neo-Lamarekian.' Professor Hyatt died at Cambridge in 1902.