Background

Addison Emery Verrill was born at Greenwood, Maine. He was the second son of George Washington and Lucy (Hillborn) Verrill.

On his father's side, he was a descendant of Samuel Verrill who was in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1727; on his mother's, of early Pennsylvania Quakers.

Education

Verrill was prepared for college at the Norway Liberal Institute in Norway, Maine, where his family lived after 1853, and in 1859 entered Harvard College. There he was Agassiz's assistant in the Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1860 to 1864, two years after his graduation from the Lawrence Scientific School with the degree of B. S.

As an undergraduate, he spent several summers with Alpheus Hyatt and Nathaniel S. Shaler in field work in Maine, Labrador, and on the islands of Anticosti and Grand Manan.

Career

In 1864, Verrill was called to Yale University as professor of zoology; in 1907, he retired as professor emeritus. For a number of years (1870 - 94), he also taught geology in the Sheffield Scientific School, and for two years (1868 - 70) acted as professor of entomology and comparative anatomy at the University of Wisconsin. In 1873, appeared his Report upon the Invertebrate Animals of Vineyard Sound and Adjacent Waters, the first extensive ecological study of the marine invertebrates of the southern New England coast, for many years a standard reference work.

For sixteen years (1871 - 87), he was in charge of the scientific work of the United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries in southern New England. In connection with this, he devised a cradle sieve, a rake dredge, and a rope tangle for collecting starfishes in oyster beds, the latter of which has great value in commercial oyster-growing. His scientific studies were interrupted for several years by his work in preparing zoological definitions for the revised edition of Webster's International Dictionary (1890).

During the ensuing years, he investigated the invertebrate life of the northern New England coast, the Gulf Stream, the Pacific coast of Central America, the Bermudas, and the West Indies. Everywhere he turned, his discerning eyes found new types of animal life which others had overlooked; he once estimated that he had discovered a thousand undescribed forms. Much of his most important work appeared after his retirement in 1907 at the age of sixty-eight; at eighty-five, still sturdy and vigorous, he extended his studies to the Hawaiian Islands and during the next two years discovered many new species.

At last, however, his remarkable vitality was exhausted, and toward the end of his eighty-eighth year, he died at Santa Barbara, California, survived by four of his six children. His publications over a period of sixty-four years covered a wide range, but the majority deal with marine invertebrates, among them sponges, corals, sea stars, worms, mollusks, Crustacea, and representatives of other groups. Some of these were comprehensive monographs were still standards of reference in the 1930s.

Achievements

• Verrill's most successful work was probably that on corals and coelenterates, where he not only described new species and worked out a sound system of classification but made careful observations on mode of life. Other notable work includes his Monograph of the Shallow-Water Starfishes of the North Pacific Coast (1914), Report on the Starfishes of the West Indies, Florida, and Brazil (1915), and several valuable unpublished reports, among them one on the higher Crustacea of Connecticut, and another on the deep-sea Alcyonaria of the Blake expedition, which Verrill considered in many respects his most important work. His Bermuda Islands, which deals with the history, geology, botany, and zoology of Bermuda, attests the breadth of his knowledge in diverse fields. In addition to his notable achievements in the classification of marine invertebrates, he built up a large zoological collection in the Peabody Museum at Yale, of which he was curator for forty-three years (1867 - 1910), and served as associate editor of the American Journal of Science for fifty years (1869 - 1920). He was an early member of the National Academy of Sciences and of many other American and foreign learned societies, and for some years was president of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1959, Yale's Peabody Museum established the Addison Emory Verrill Medal, awarded for achievement in the natural sciences.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Relations Between Bermuda and the American Colonies During the Revolutionary War (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Relations Between Bermuda and the American C...)

  • A Key to the Mollusca: Verrill's Systematic Catalogue of the Invertebrates of Southern New England and the Adjacent Waters

    (A Key to the Mollusca - Verrill's Systematic Catalogue of...)

  • Harriman Alaska Series

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Report on The Cephalopods

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Bulletins from the Laboratories of Natural History

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The Cephalopods of the North-Eastern Coast of America.

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

Membership

a member of the National Academy of Sciences

Personality

Tall, with thick, wavy hair, and piercing blue eyes, he is remembered as a man with a marvelous memory, an encyclopedic mind, and an uncanny aptitude for close discrimination. He had great skill in drawing, producing with little effort vivid sketches of even the most intricate structures.

In contrast with Hyatt, whose bent was philosophical, and Shaler, with a gift for generalization and popularization, Verrill was the patient, painstaking investigator, capable of giving a vast accumulation of details clarity and order, and of making the most minute distinctions salient.

Standing a little aside from the main course of biological investigation as it developed in his lifetime, Verrill held firmly to a belief in the value of taxonomical work as a basis for other scientific investigations. He himself would never have been satisfied with a knowledge of animals under laboratory conditions alone. It is perhaps partly as a consequence of this that his true position as one of the greatest systematic zoologists of America has not yet been fully recognized.

Connections

On June 15, 1865, Verrill was married to Flora Louisa Smith of Norway, Maine, sister of his associate, Prof. Sidney I. Smith.

Mother:

Lucy (Hillborn) Verrill

father:

George Washington Verrill

Wife:

Flora Louisa Smith

Died on 25 Jan 1915.

Daughter:

Clarence Sidney Verrill

6 May 1877 - 25 October 1918

Daughter:

Edith Barton Verrill Akers

2 August 1875 - 26 March 1965

Son:

Hyatt Verrill

Original Name Alpheus Hyatt Verrill 23 July 1871 - 14 November 1954

Son:

Alpheus Hyatt Verrill

23 July 1871 – 14 November 1954 Was an American zoologist, explorer, inventor, illustrator and author.

Son:

George E. Verrill

29 July 1866 - 28 June 1946