Background
Morse, Edward Sylvester, , Maine 1838 1925 Male Museum Director Zoologist zoologist and museum director, was born at Portland, Me. , a son of Jonathan Kimball and Jane Seymour (Beckett) Morse.
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Edward Morse
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Education
He attended the Bethel (Maine) Academy, then served for a time as mechanical draftsman at the Portland locomotive works.
Most important for his development, he registered as a special student of Louis Agassiz at the Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard University, specializing for three years in conchology.
He helped to found the American Naturalist and in 1869 became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He was professor of zo"logy and comparative anatomy at Bowdoin College, 1871-74.
Career
He began in boyhood to collect and classify shells and minerals.
In 1876 he was elected a vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and served in 1886 as president.
This versatility was natural, for Morse's mentality was encyclopedic.
Admitted this disqualification, his journals of the Japanese years, carefully kept and illustrated with his expressive and descriptive drawings, are very important documents.
Morse opened a laboratory at Eno-Shima and was invited to teach zo"logy at the Imperial University, Tokyo.
From the train between Eno-Shima and the capital Morse's alert eye detected some shell heaps, ignored by the native savants.
His excavation of these kitchen-middens with their pre-historic artifacts was an epoch in the annals of anthropology.
While visiting Yezo and the Hokkaido Morse first saw the Aino and perceived their probable kinship with the brunette white races.
Having found at Omori the earliest of Japanese potteries he set out to form a complete collection of the national ceramics, including the works of living potters.
In association with the Boston collectors, William Sturgis Bigelow and Ernest F. Fenollosa [qq. v. ]
, he took part in the preservation of almost countless objects of art at a time when the Japanese were inclined to dispose of them.
A friendship formed with Percival Lowell [q. v. ], astronomer and author of The Soul of the Far East (1888), preceded the astronomical observations and researches to be embodied later in a book on Mars.
Morse's first residence in Japan ended in 1880 when he returned to Salem to take up his lifework as director of the Peabody Museum.
He revisited Japan in 1882, extending his journey to China.
He was the first American to be so honored.
He drew brilliantly, on occasion, with both hands.
The Peabody Museum, meantime, became primarily Morse's museum, with his multifarious collections, attractively arranged.
His great catalogue of the collection, scholarly, discriminating, and readable, was published in 1901.
His publications, which concerned, besides the subjects already mentioned, music, archery, numismatics, and other topics, were numerous and yet, apparently, never superficial or casual.
A vivid emotionality and an accompanying irritability gave to his writing and conversation a piquant charm, and an obvious limitation.
The books, besides the ceramic catalogue mentioned, by which he is best represented are: First Book of Zo"logy (1875); Japanese Homes and their Surroundings (1886); Glimpses of China and Chinese Homes (1902); Mars and its Mystery (1906); Japan Day by Day (2 vols. , 1917).
Japan Day by Day is autobiographical.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts possesses the notes on which the Cat.
of the Morse Collection of Japanese Pottery (1901) was based.
See especially the obituary article by F. S. Kershaw in the Museum of Fine Arts Bull. , Feb. 1926, and the obituary, Boston Herald, Dec. 21, 1925. ]
Politics
The Pacific Ocean brachiopods lured Morse to Japan in 1877.
Personality
He was, however, intensely emotional and often prejudiced, as when he allowed his anti-religious bias to cause him to ignore much of the mythological lore and ceremonial life of ancient Japan.
He was painstaking if not always patient.
Connections
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Born
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Died
1925 (aged 87) -
Religion
Naturalist -
Political Party
Pacific