Robert Parr Whitfield

Background

Robert Parr Whitfield was the son of English parents, William Fenton and Margaret (Parr) Whitfield. He was born at New Hartford, Oneida County, N. Y. , but spent six years (1835 - 41) in England.

Education

He was for the most part self-educated.

Career

At thirteen he learned his father's trade of spindle-making in Utica, N. Y. ; at twenty he became an assistant in Samuel Chubbuck's instrument-manufacturing shop there, and soon rose to be a partner and manager (1849 - 56). During these years in Utica he mastered the art of mechanical drafting, was an active member of the Utica Society of Naturalists, and made collections of mollusks and of fossils from Silurian rocks. In 1856 he was engaged by James Hall, state geologist at Albany, as an assistant in paleontology and geology. In Albany he developed a more profound interest in paleontology. His associations with Hall and such brilliant young assistants as Charles Abiathar White, Fielding Bradford Meek, and William More Gabb added zest to his new work, and he had an opportunity to meet men like Thomas Sterry Hunt, Peter Lesley, James Merrill Safford, J. L. R. Agassiz, Ferdinand V. Hayden, and others who came to Albany to confer with Hall. His work during the first year at Albany consisted of preparatory analyses of copious fossil material offered for examination, classification, and description. Then he began to make those beautiful illustrations of graptolites, crinoids, corals, brachiopods, trilobites, cephalopods, and other fossils which gave added distinction to the volumes issued by James Hall on the paleontology of New York, Canada, Ohio, and Iowa. During the twenty years that he remained with the New York state geological survey as its chief illustrator, he made thousands of highly finished drawings of fossils and developed an unusual appreciation of their morphological structure. Little opportunity or permission was granted for the preparation of scientific papers on these objects, but he published two papers under his own name, one with C. A. White, and nine with James Hall. In 1872 Whitfield was on the staff of the United States geological survey of the Territories. He also was lecturer in geology (1872 - 75) and later professor of geology (1875 - 77) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N. Y. In 1877 he became curator of geology in the American Museum of Natural History, New York. There he worked on the James Hall collection of fossils, labeling, arranging, and installing the specimens, an undertaking covering many years of effort. During the thirty-two years of his curatorship he identified and classified vast quantities of fossil material from other sources as well. His entries were made in longhand in six large quarto volumes, four of them devoted to American and two to foreign species. Through his efforts, a catalogue of the 8, 000 types and figured specimens in the museum collection was prepared and published as Volume XI (1898) of the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. The Bulletin itself had been established in 1881 largely as a result of Whitfield's urgings, and he was a frequent contributor to it. He died after a lingering illness of several weeks at Troy, N. Y. , and was buried in Rural Cemetery at Albany, not far from the graves of Ebenezer Emmons and James Hall.

Achievements

• His carefully prepared scientific papers number more than a hundred. Some of these were short, others monographic. Apart from his work on the New York collections, he found time to study and describe the fossils collected by Clarence King's survey of the fortieth parallel, by Walter B. Jenney's and William Ludlow's expeditions to the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the collection assembled by the geological surveys of New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin. The thousands of beautiful drawings and descriptions which he made are indelibly impressed upon the pages of science. In December 1909, after more than thirty-two years in the American Museum, he was made curator emeritus.

Membership

He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Geological Society of America, and a member of many other scientific societies.

Personality

Although Whitfield was not of robust physique, he was generally in good health, and, being systematic in his habits and punctilious in his attentions to duty, he accomplished an immense amount of work during the eighty-two years of his life. He was quiet, reserved, and unostentatious, and so devoted to his chosen science that he usually spent his short vacations in the field, collecting. His associations with the objects that he loved, and which he conscientiously and unremittingly studied, remained unbroken to the end.

Connections

He was married at twenty to Mary Henry.

Father:

William Fenton Whitfield

Mother:

Margaret (Parr) Whitfield

Spouse:

Mary Henry

Son:

James Edward Whitfield

A chemist