Background

Henry Fairfield Osborn was born on August 8, 1857, at Fairfield, Connecticut, the second of four children and first of three sons of William Henry Osborn and Virginia Reed (Sturges) Osborn. His birthplace, for which he was named, was the home of generations of his mother's ancestors. Jonathan Sturges, his maternal grandfather, was a prominent merchant in New York City. His paternal ancestry was also of early New England stock. Henry Fairfield was born to assured financial and social position, a circumstance that accelerated his career and that helped to mold his benevolently autocratic character.

Education

Most of Henry's boyhood was spent in New York City, where he attended the Columbia Grammar School and M. W. Lyon's Collegiate Institute. Summers were spent at Garrison, on the Hudson River north of New York. Here his father later built "Castle Rock" on a hilltop far above the river, which became Henry Fairfield's favorite residence. Except for Frederick, no one in the immediate family or in the known ancestry showed any inclination toward science, nor did Henry Fairfield as a boy, and nothing in his childhood presaged his later profession. His father was personally uninterested in science but gave unstinted assistance when Henry eventually elected to follow this career. Later Henry studied at Princeton, which he entered in 1873 and where he was graduated with Bachelor of Arts degree in 1877.

In 1878-79 Henry took courses in anatomy and histology under William H. Welch at the Bellevue Medical College and the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York. Welch wrote that Osborn was the best pupil he ever had and introduced him to Dr. William Osler. In 1879 Osborn went to Europe and studied embryology under Francis M. Balfour at Cambridge and comparative anatomy under Thomas H. Huxley in London.

Career

In 1877 Osborn, together with Scott and Speir, traveled to Colorado and Wyoming and collected many fossils, especially Eocene mammals. This trip and the subsequent study and publication of the collection were the beginnings of lifelong devotion to vertebrate paleontology both for Osborn and for Scott (long professor of this subject at Princeton). In 1878 these three and others conducted a second expedition to Wyoming. In later years Osborn was a frequent visitor at fossil camps and he planned and directed an enormous collecting program, but these two student trips and an expedition to the Fayum of Egypt in 1907 were the only ones that he conducted personally.

While at Princeton as a teacher he made a journey in the South for embryological, not paleontological, materials, and disappointment in its results persuaded him that he was not talented as a field naturalist. His typical reaction was not to waste more time on things that he could have better done by others. Interest in paleontology was permanently aroused, but there was more promise at Princeton in biology.

Osborn met all the great English biologists of the time, including Darwin, and began the series of close international friendships that played a large part in both his social and his professional life. Returning to Princeton, he taught and studied there for ten years, becoming professor of natural science in 1881 and professor of comparative anatomy in 1883. Osborn's research at Princeton was mainly anatomical, especially in the field of neuroanatomy, and included important studies of the corpus callosum and other brain structures. His students were instrumental in the rise of modern neurology. Studies on fossil mammals were continued, and in 1886 he went to England to examine the rare, tiny remains of Mesozoic mammals, producing a memoir on them that betrayed haste and inexperience in some of its details but that significantly advanced an obscure, misunderstood subject and already exemplified his remarkable powers of synthesis and generalization.

A new and definitive phase in Osborn's career began in 1891, when he was called to Columbia University to organize a department of biology as Da Costa Professor of Biology (later "of Zoology") and simultaneously to the American Museum of Natural History to organize and head a department of mammalian paleontology. After about 1907 he ceased conducting regular courses at Columbia, but retained an honorary research listing on the Columbia faculty. His formal teaching career thus ended, after more than twenty-five years, although he continued to give training to his subordinates in the museum and to instruct the public through the museum's exhibits and through innumerable lectures and voluminous publications. In the professional field he did not found a school in the sense of handing down a particular body of theories or of special methods, but he communicated a soundness of training and a passion for research that have had a profound effect on vertebrate paleontology. Both in the United States and in England many of his important successors were either trained by him or by his students, and there are no vertebrate paleontologists who have not been strongly influenced by this intellectual lineage. His effect on popular education was less tangible but no less real.

Osborn led the movement that made museum displays not only diversions for the public or static accumulations of unexplained research materials - the two extremes of nineteenth-century museums - but also means of direct and interesting instruction for the layman. He popularized paleontology and, more than any other one person, made "dinosaur" a household word.

Henry fought all his life for freedom of education, notably by participating in the attack on the antievolutionary statute of Tennessee, but also on other occasions. Among his publications in this connection were The Earth Speaks to Bryan (1925) and Evolution and Religion in Education (1926).

Osborn's connection with the American Museum continued for forty-five years and consumed practically all his time for the last thirty of these. With tremendous personal energy that never waned and with the ability to coordinate and to absorb the work of numerous assistants, he carried on two simultaneous careers in the museum, one administrative and one scientific, while also doing much work for other organizations, notably the New York Zoological Society. In 1895 the department of mammalian paleontology (founded in 1891) was renamed department of vertebrate paleontology and correspondingly made more inclusive in collections and activities. Although not always its nominal head, he continued to control and to guide it until his death. The department was made an important research center. Starting with almost no specimens but with a plan for systematic work on the fossil mammals of North America, with the aid of an exceptionally able staff of assistants, Osborn built up the department to include all classes of fossil vertebrates from almost every continent, and when he died the collection was second to none in the world.

As early as 1899 Osborn began to assist in the administration of the American Museum as a whole, in addition to the direction of his own department. In 1908 he became president of the museum and held this post for twenty-five years. During this period and largely as a result of his efforts, the museum grew remarkably and forged ahead to world leadership in several of its included fields. The building space more than doubled, the city appropriation increased about three times, the endowment became seven times as large, the scientific staff more than three times, and the membership more than four times. Increase in the value of collections and in the published scientific and popular studies of them was comparable in extent. Osborn's dual experience as teacher and research worker led him to stress the equal and complementary development of educational and scientific functions in the museum, to which he added a cultured esthetic judgment that set new standards of physical attractiveness for halls and displays. The financial requirements of this large program were met in greatest part by private gifts, a field in which Osborn's family background and wide acquaintance among the wealthy gave him special advantages.

On coming to the museum, Osborn laid out for himself a research program aimed at a definitive memoir on all the fossil mammals of North America. The unexampled success of preparations for this memoir made the completion of the plan impossible. So much material was accumulated that it soon became evident that no one man could study it all and no one work summarize its results. His book, The Age of Mammals in Europe, Asia and North America (1910), in which the faunas of all these continents and the migrations between them are summarized, quickly became a classic, but it may be considered as a by-product of the earlier, typically grandiose scheme. He planned as if he were to live forever and he laid out more work for himself than could have been completed in ten lifetimes. In its reduced and more nearly practicable form, his personal research program of describing and classifying fossils included complete monographs on the rhinoceroses, horses, titanotheres (extinct allies of the rhinoceroses and horses), proboscideans, and sauropod dinosaurs. He published voluminously on all these topics, but when he died he was still looking forward to the rhinoceros and sauropod monographs.

Besides many shorter papers Osborn published a study of fossil horses of 217 quarto pages and fifty-four plates, Equidæ of the Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene of North America (1918). This, however, he considered only preliminary to a definitive monograph that was never written. The Titanotheres of Ancient Wyoming, Dakota, and Nebraska (1929), in two large quarto volumes, was completed and published in his lifetime, and the even larger Proboscidea, A Monograph of the Discovery, Evolution, Migration, and Extinction of the Mastodonts and Elephants of the World was essentially completed and was published posthumously (1936, 1942). Osborn's whole published output included nearly a thousand titles and more than 12, 000 printed pages. About half of this great volume of publication is devoted to vertebrate paleontology, and the greater part of it represents the results of original, technical research.

Next in order of bulk come administration (mostly executive reports), biography, and anthropology. In the last-named field he did little basic research, but he published a useful popular book, Men of the Old Stone Age (1925), and he aptly criticized and modified theories of human evolution on the basis of his studies of evolution in general. Lesser headings in his own classification of his researches and publications are comparative anatomy, principles of evolution (but these are also discussed or exemplified in almost all his paleontological works), and education. In keeping with his biological training and approach, his work includes little on geology, strictly speaking. His limited acquaintance with modern geology and his restricted field experience were, indeed, the only evident lacun in what may otherwise be considered the broadest background and widest personal experience ever acquired by a paleontologist.

While assembling a multitude of facts, Osborn "always found the mere assemblage of facts an extremely painful and self-denying process. " He held that "the discovery of new principles" - and not the methodical accumulation of observations - "is the chief end of research. " He was not by taste an objective student but a philosopher who reluctantly disciplined himself to the drudgery of basing his philosophy on factual data. His theoretical work was underrated by most of his professional contemporaries because it fell between two schools: most of his paleontological colleagues were realists of the école des faits, who lacked Osborn's knowledge of biological philosophy and who neither understood nor trusted his idealist tendencies; on the other hand, his career overlapped the decline of comparative anatomy and the rise of experimental biology and genetics, whose practitioners, in the first flush of enthusiasm, believed that they had found the sole, complete key to evolutionary principles and that paleontology was a purely descriptive science with no further fundamental contribution to make. Only toward or after the end of Osborn's life did others begin to see the desirability of coordination of the two fields of which he had so energetically and, it must be judged, so prematurely attempted a synthesis.

Participating in the reaction against Victorian mechanistic determinism, Osborn developed a general theory of vitalistic determinism personal to him and acceptable to few either in the old schools or the new. He rejected any important random influences in evolution and held that mutation is a mere accident interfering with, not determining, the direction of evolution, a belief based in part on a misunderstanding of the implications and nature of mutations, which were, in a different way, equally misunderstood by the early geneticists who found Osborn's views heretical. He early decided that evolution normally proceeds in straight, parallel lines, and his classifications are all highly polyphyletic. He came to believe that the direction of these lines is predetermined and that modifications appear gradually in the germ plasm without regard for natural selection, at least in the first stages, and without any of the random character ascribed to mutations. Finally he concluded that evolution has in each case a definite goal and that progressive lines proceed by accretions that are good in purpose and effect. Such doctrines appeared mystical or quasi-religious and not scientific to many of his contemporaries, and they were made further unpalatable by their expression in a complex terminology peculiar to Osborn.

Summing up his own career he acknowledged that these principles had "gained no acceptance in the current realm of either biologic or paleontologic thought, " but with characteristic confidence and tolerance he added that "one need not be impatient: if new principles are sound they will finally gain universal acceptance; if unsound, the less widely they are accepted the better. " On the other hand many of the descriptive principles first or best expressed by Osborn, such as that of adaptive radiation, became in his lifetime fundamental in evolutionary theory. It is evident that much of the theory, rejected as he expressed it, is capable of, and is receiving, reexpression from somewhat different points of view and is eventuating in sound progress. In his attempts to synthesize experimental and observational data Osborn was definitely ahead of his contemporaries, and even his errors served as guide-posts for those who followed. Few men have received more ample recognition of their accomplishments.

Osborn was given almost every honor open to a member of his professions anywhere in the world, including, according to a list published five years before his death, twelve medals or similar awards, memberships in sixty-one learned societies and academies in fifteen countries (besides a still larger number of professional or educational organizations), and honorary degrees from nine universities. Aside from these honors, he was an active, working member of numerous organizations, including such positions as vice-president of the Hispanic Society, president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, paleontologist and senior geologist of the United States Geological Survey, president of the Paleontological Society, president of the New York Zoological Society, and president of the Audubon Society of New York.

Henry Osborn died at the age of 78 in Garrison, New York.

Achievements

• Henry Osborn had forged a career as a leading organizer and administrator for science in New York City: in the early 1890's he founded the departments of biology at Columbia University and vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, he was a founder and the first president of the Bronx Zoo (1896), he also helped to reorganize the New York Aquarium (1902).
  
  Henry Osborn became president of the American Museum of Natural History in 1908 and held this post for twenty-five years. During his presidency the building space more than doubled, the city appropriation increased about three times, the endowment became seven times as large, the scientific staff more than three times, and the membership more than four times.
  
  Henry Osborn's major works: The Age of Mammals in Europe, Asia and North America (1910); Equidæ of the Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene of North America (1918); Men of the Old Stone Age (1925); The Earth Speaks to Bryan (1925); Evolution and Religion in Education (1926).
  
  Osborn developed his own evolution theory of man's origins called the "Dawn Man Theory".
  
  An African dwarf crocodile, Osteolaemus osborni, was named in Osborn's honor by Karl Patterson Schmidt in 1919.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Cenozoic Mammal Horizons of Western North America: With Faunal Lists of the Tertiary Mammalia of the West (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Cenozoic Mammal Horizons of Western North Am...)

  • From the Greeks to Darwin: An Outline of the Development of the Evolution Idea (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from From the Greeks to Darwin: An Outline of the...)

  • The Horse, Past and Present, in the American Museum of Natural History and in the Zoological Park (Classic Reprint)

    (In 1891 the American Museum began its long series of expl...)

  • The Titanotheres of Ancient Wyoming, Dakota, and Nebraska, Vol. 2 (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Titanotheres of Ancient Wyoming, Dakota,...)

  • The Titanotheres of Ancient Wyoming, Dakota, and Nebraska, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Titanotheres of Ancient Wyoming, Dakota,...)

  • The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European history. 4th rev. ed., with a documentary supplement, with prefaces by Henry Fairfield Osborn

    (The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of Eu...)

  • A Mounted Skeleton Of The Columbian Mammoth (1907)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Proboscidea, Vol. 1: A Monograph of the Discovery, Evolution, Migration and Extinction of the Mastodonts and Elephants of the World; Moeritherioidea, Deinotherioidea, Mastodontoidea (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Proboscidea, Vol. 1: A Monograph of the Disc...)

Religion

Henry Osborn became an energetic, outspoken opponent of fundamentalist Protestantism, but his own more liberal convictions, and also his scientific philosophy, plainly bore the stamp of ancestral Presbyterianism. It was at Princeton, that Osborn's studious and religious nature was turned to the pursuit of science. Dr. James McCosh, a philosophical divine who believed in evolution as God's means of creation, certainly encouraged and perhaps initiated this transition. Arnold Guyot, professor of geology, helped to give it direction.

Membership

Henry Osborn was a member of the Boone and Crockett Club, vice-president of the Hispanic Society, president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, president of the Paleontological Society, president of the New York Zoological Society, president of the Audubon Society of New York, and a member of the US Geological Survey.

Personality

In the accompanying and equally necessary political maneuvers, Osborn's inability to compromise and impatience with stupidity might have told heavily against him had they not been largely compensated by inflexibility of purpose, refusal to accept defeat, and a hard-won reputation that inspired deference even in ward-heelers.

As seen in later life, Osborn was physically large, with strong, rather heavy, but aristocratic features. The long side-whiskers of his younger manhood were soon trimmed, but he retained a short, wide mustache and continued to part his wavy hair in the middle. His demeanor was affable, often enthusiastic, but marked by a strong sense of personal dignity. He was quick to resent brusque treatment or any other affront to this dignity, but he had endless patience and respect for honest disagreement courteously expressed. His own opinions, however, once reached were seldom modified by such disagreement, and he often invited criticism and advice but rarely acted on it. He is said to have been shy as a youth, but no evidence of this remained in maturity. He was fully conscious of his own worth and as frank in statement of it as he was in acknowledging his faults. This serene self-confidence was one of the main elements in his successful leadership, and another was his great optimism. His active, restless interest found a thousand tasks for himself and for all around him, usually practical but occasionally visionary, and he considered any hints of difficulty or impossibility as inadmissibly destructive criticisms. This characteristic sometimes invited failure and resentment, but it also sometimes resulted in accomplishing the apparently impossible. A favorite word, constantly repeated in titles and text of his works and in his conversation, was "creative. " He believed in and worked for creative education, creative evolution, creative administration, and creative living.

Connections

On September 29, 1881, Henry Osborn married Lucretia Thatcher Perry (born in Augusta, Georgia, April 23, 1858, died August 26, 1930), daughter of Gen. A. J. Perry. There were five children: Virginia Sturges, Alexander Perry, Henry Fairfield, Josephine Adams, and Gurdon Saltonstall, who died in infancy.

Father:

William Henry Osborn

Mother:

Virginia Reed (Sturges) Osborn

Wife:

Lucretia Thatcher (Perry) Osborn

Daughter:

Josephine Adams Osborn

Daughter:

Virginia Sturges Osborn

Son:

Gurdon Saltonstall Osborn

He died in infancy.

Son:

Alexander Perry Osborn

Son:

Henry Fairfield Osborn

Brother:

Frederick Osborn

He was drowned in the Hudson when only fifteen, was an ardent bird collector.

Brother:

William Church Osborn

He became an attorney and one of the leading citizens of New York.