The Theory of Evolution: With Special Reference to the Evidence Upon Which It Is Founded
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A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere; Illustrated With 32 Plates and More Than 100 Drawings
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William Berryman Scott was an American geologist and paleontologist. He was authority on mammals, and principal author of the White River Oligocene monographs.
Background
William Berryman was born on February 12, 1858 in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States, to William McKendree Scott, a Presbyterian minister, and Mary Elizabeth (Hodge) Scott; he was the youngest of their three sons who survived infancy.
His father, the son of an immigrant from northern Ireland, had graduated from Jefferson College (later Washington and Jefferson) in Pennsylvania and had attended the Princeton Theological Seminary.
William's mother was a daughter of a professor at the seminary, Charles Hodge. His older brother Hugh Lenox Scott became superintendent of West Point and the army's chief of staff.
The family moved in William's infancy to Chicago, where the father taught at the Northwestern (later McCormick) Theological Seminary until his declining health caused the family to return to Princeton. After his death, when William was three, they remained in Princeton, living with Mrs. Scott's parents. Reared chiefly among adults in an intellectual and religious household, Scott had a lonely but stimulating childhood.
Education
William Berryman Scott was tutored at home until he was nine, spent much time in reading, and at first planned to become a clergyman. After attending a series of inadequate private schools, where he became attracted to chemistry, he entered the College of New Jersey (Princeton) at the age of fifteen, intending to prepare for a career in medicine, but a course in geology under Arnold Guyot shifted his interest to the study of geology and fossils. He received the Barchelor of arts degree in 1877. Scott spent a year (1877 - 1878) in graduate study at Princeton.
He studied embryology under Francis M. Balfour at Cambridge. He received the Doctor of philosophy in zoology in 1880, summa cum laude, with a dissertation on the embryology of the lamprey.
Career
In 1877, with his classmates Henry Fairfield Osborn and Francis Speir, Jr. , Scott went to the Bridger Basin of Wyoming to collect fossil mammals, the first of ten such collecting trips he made during the period 1877-1893 to Wyoming, South Dakota, Oregon, and Montana.
He did biological research in the laboratory of Thomas H. Huxley at the Royal College of Science in London, and then went on to Heidelberg, where he worked under Carl Gegenbaur.
He returned to Princeton as instructor in geology, and in 1884, at the age of twenty-six, was appointed professor. In 1909 he became chairman of the newly established department of geology. At his retirement in 1930, he had served fifty years on the Princeton faculty.
Scott was an excellent teacher and writer, and his textbook, An Introduction to Geology, went through three editions (1897, 1907, 1932). His major interest, however, was fossil mammals. Like his lifelong friend Osborn, he became one of the most important vertebrate paleontologists of his era.
His views were reflected in his The Theory of Evolution (1917). Scott was active in many professional organizations. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1906 and served as president of the Paleontological Society (1911), the American Philosophical Society (1918 - 1925), and the Geological Society of America (1925).
At the age of seventy-seven, four years after his retirement, Scott undertook another large project and with two assistants prepared a five-part monograph (1936 - 1941) on the Oligocene mammalian fauna of the White River Group. He then began a new work, a revision of the late Eocene Uinta fauna, which occupied him until the last weeks of his life. He died of a heart attack at Princeton in his ninetieth year.
Achievements
William Berryman Scott was preeminent in his descriptive and taxonomic studies of fossil vertebrates and in the mammalian paleontology of the Tertiary period. Of his publications, numbering over 170, perhaps the most important was A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere. Another important project, which occupied Scott for more than thirty years, was editing the reports of Princeton's fossil-collecting expeditions (1896 - 1899) to Patagonia.
In 1910 he received Wollaston Medal from the Geological Society of London. Among his honors were the Mary Clark Thompson and the Daniel Giraud Elliot medals of the National Academy, Penrose Medal from the Geological Society of America, Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.
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Religion
Scott was a lifelong Presbyterian.
Views
Scott became a strong partisan of the paleontologist Edward D. Cope in his bitter feud with Othniel C. Marsh.
In the early stages of his career he attacked the problem of evolution. Taught in his boyhood that Darwinism was "atheism, " he learned from his study of fossils to accept evolution as a fact, and he set forth some of the basic questions relating to species origin and differentiation. Later he became doubtful of Mendelism as an adequate explanation and concluded that the basic processes operating in evolutionary change had yet to be discovered.
Personality
William Berryman had a phenomenal memory. Scott was unassuming but somewhat formal in manner.
Interests
William Berryman Scott enjoyed music and travel, was fond of the sea.
Connections
On December 15, 1883, Scott married Alice Adeline Post of New York City. Their seven children were Charles Hodge, Adeline Mitchill (who married author Herbert Agar), Mary Blanchard, Anne Kneeland, Hugh Lenox, Sarah Post, and Angelina Thayer.
