Timothy Abbott Conrad was an American geologist and malacologist. He was one of the last of the prominent group of early Philadelphia naturalists, who paved the way for the more philosophical biologists of the present day.
Background
Conrad was born on June 21, 1803, in Trenton, New Jersey, the son of Elizabeth Abbott and Solomon White Conrad, a printer, a minister of the Society of Friends, and a professor of botany at the University of Pennsylvania. The family often entertained such eminent naturalists as Say, Nuttall, and Rafinesque. In this environment, young Conrad became so interested in science that he was removed from the rolls of the Society of Friends for taking nature walks on the Sabbath.
Education
Conrad attended a Quaker school in West Town, Pennsylvania; and although he never went to college, he taught himself Latin, Greek, French, and natural history. He had a talent for drawing and learned lithography in his father’s printing shop. These skills served him well in later years, when he prepared many of his own illustrations.
Career
In Conrad’s day, a naturalist who discovered a new species rarely did more than publish a description of the fossil and place it in his personal cabinet for display. Conrad, however, went on to try to determine its geologic significance. He did this with Tertiary fossils that he collected in the southern and Atlantic states and also with those collected by explorers in the Far West. The resulting papers, together with some on modern marine and freshwater mollusks, the Silurian and Devonian fossils of New York state, the correlation of American and European Cretaceous rocks, and numerous papers on particular genera of mollusks, led to his recognition as an outstanding authority on both paleontology and malacology. He also wrote papers on the general geology of the eastern United States and published the first geologic map of Alabama.
Between 1830 and 1837 Conrad published twenty-two scientific papers, preparing most of the illustrations himself and defraying the cost of publication by subscriptions for collections of specimens and by the sale of his publications. During this time he was often almost destitute. He printed only limited editions of his early papers; and after running off a given number of plates for the first edition, he would grind off the stones used in making its illustrations. If a second edition was needed, the plates were not identical with those in the first edition.
Conrad relied on the hospitality of friends when he was doing fieldwork and financed his expeditions by borrowing from his scientific colleagues, repaying them with collections of specimens. In Alabama he traveled by coach when he had the fare, solicited rides or went afoot when he did not, and made the best of such lodgings as he could find.
In 1837, at the age of thirty-four, Conrad became paleontologist of the New York State Geological Survey and for the first time received a salary. As a result of wise investments in railroad stock he ultimately became financially independent.
Conrad was one of a small group of scientists who in 1840 organized the Association of American Geologists, the predecessor of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was an honorary member of many scientific societies at home and abroad.
His descriptions of fossils are commonly too brief, and some of his illustrations of small shells are unclear because he made it a practice to draw each specimen at its natural size. Conrad wrote letters and labels on odd scraps of paper in an illegible hand and was often careless in giving references and describing localities. He rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution, holding instead to the viewpoint of special creation, although he accepted Lyell’s uniformitarianism.
Timothy Conrad defended the theory of periodical refrigeration and suggested that the Mississippi depression was the consequence of the upheaval of the Appalachians and the later elevation of the area of the Rocky Mountains.
Personality
Conrad was absent-minded, moody, and often melancholy to the verge of suicide. In his later years, he was so depressed by failing memory that he sought seclusion.
As a conversationist, Conrad had few superiors, but a weakness of his voice made it difficult for him to be heard, and it was only when with two or three intimate friends that this quality shone out. He avoided large gatherings and never spoke in public. He had a keen sense of humor and was an inveterate punster. His memory was “very bad” scientifically, says Prof. Dall, but it was remarkably good so far as poetry was concerned, and when walking alone in the country he would repeat aloud long passages from the works of his favorite authors.
Conrad sometimes wrote poetry, and his letters contained vivid descriptions of the countryside that he so dearly loved.
Interests
poetry
Connections
Although he longed for a home of his own, Conrad never married.