Charles Russell Orcutt

Last updated
Charles Russell Orcutt
Charles Russell Orcutt 1864-1929.jpg
BornApril 27, 1864
DiedAugust 25, 1929(1929-08-25) (aged 65)
Nationality American
Scientific career
Fields Botany
Institutions San Diego Natural History Museum
Author abbrev. (botany) Orcutt

Charles Russell Orcutt or C.R. Orcutt (born 27 April 1864 in Hartland, Vermont; died in Haiti 25 August 1929) was a noted naturalist sometimes called "cactus man" because on many expeditions he found new species of cacti. He was active in the San Diego Society of Natural History, promoting the foundation of a local natural history museum, now the San Diego Natural History Museum. [1] He edited the American Botanist (1898-1900), American Plants (1907-1910), and Western Scientist (1884-1919) and in his collecting work, made contributions to the fields of botany and malacology. [2]

Contents

Biography

Orcutt was the eldest of five children of Herman Chandler Orcutt and Eliza Eastin Gray Orcutt. In 1879, the Orcutt family moved to San Diego, where his father, a horticulturalist, opened a nursery near the ruins of the San Diego Mission de Alcalá. Orcutt worked with his father, collecting plant specimens in the San Diego area and Baja California. [1] He traveled there with Charles Christopher Parry, Cyrus Pringle, and Marcus E. Jones, with whom he learned to properly catalog, collect, and preserve specimens. The genus Orcuttia and variants are named for him. [3] In 1884 he began The West American Scientist, which he irregularly published until 1919. He began to be referred to as witty and as a hopeless eccentric. The year 1892 proved significant for him as his father died and he married a doctor from New York named Olive Lucy Eddy. Eddy was among the first women to earn a Doctor of Medicine degree at the University of Michigan’s Homœopathic Medical College at Ann Arbor, in 1882. [4] Her medical practice did much to support them and with her sister Clara she published a magazine titled Out of Doors For Women. The couple had four children. [5]

At first Orcutt primarily collected plant specimens, but his interest began to shift from botany to conchology (Eugene Coan identified Charles as a “pioneer malacologist”). [6] He is credited with discovering at least three new Mollusca: Black abalone subspecies Haliotis cracherodii bonita and Haliotis cracherodii rosea, and Haliotis corrugata subspecies diegoensis. A new genus he found was named after him: Coralliochama orcutti. [3] He went on expeditions, often alone, to El Sauzal, Punta Banda, and as far south as Misión San Fernando Rey de España de Velicatá. He shipped a huge collection of fossils he gathered in San Quintín Bay to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. His Baja trips continued through 1919. He also traveled in Texas, Arizona, Mexico and Central America.

By 1922, Charles seldom returned home, spending time in Jamaica and Haiti. [7] He maintained a residence in Jamaica in 1927 and in 1929 the Smithsonian Institution funded him for work in Haiti. After seven months of work there, he was exhausted and ill and stayed with an American embassy official in Jérémie until he was hospitalized.

Charles Russell Orcutt died of malaria on the morning of 25 August 1929. He is buried in Port-au-Prince.

Orcutt is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of lizard, Sceloporus orcutti . [8]


The standard author abbreviation Orcutt is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name. [9]

Related Research Articles

<i>Haliotis cracherodii</i> Species of gastropod

Haliotis cracherodii, the black abalone, is a species of large edible sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Haliotidae, the abalones.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Palmer (botanist)</span> British botanist and archaeologist (1829–1911)

Edward Palmer was a self-taught British botanist and an early American archaeologist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rollo Beck</span> American ornithologist and explorer (1870–1950)

Rollo Howard Beck was an American ornithologist, bird collector for museums, and explorer. Beck's petrel and three taxa of reptiles are named after him, including a subspecies of Galápagos tortoise, Chelonoidis nigra becki from Volcán Wolf. A paper by Fellers examines all the known taxa named for Beck. Beck was recognized for his extraordinary ability as a field worker by Robert Cushman Murphy as being "in a class by himself," and by University of California at Berkeley professor of zoology Frank Pitelka as "the field worker" of his generation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Hazelius Sternberg</span> American paleontologist

Charles Hazelius Sternberg was an American fossil collector and paleontologist. He was active in both fields from 1876 to 1928, and collected fossils for Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel C. Marsh, and for the British Museum, the San Diego Natural History Museum and other museums.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Granite spiny lizard</span> Species of lizard

The granite spiny lizard is a species of lizard in the family Phrynosomatidae.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl H. Eigenmann</span> German-American ichthyologist (1863–1927)

Carl Henry Eigenmann was a German-American ichthyologist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who, along with his wife Rosa Smith Eigenmann, and his zoology students is credited with identifying and describing for the first time 195 genera containing nearly 600 species of fishes of North America and South America. Especially notable among his published papers are his studies of the freshwater fishes of South America, the evolution and systematics of South American fishes, and for his analysis of degenerative evolution based on his studies of blind cave fishes found in parts of North America and in Cuba. His most notable works are The American Characidae (1917–1929) and A revision of the South American Nematognathi or cat-fishes (1890), in addition to numerous published papers such as "Cave Vertebrates of North America, a study of degenerative evolution" (1909) and "The fresh-water fishes of Patagonia and an examination of the Archiplata-Archelenis theory" (1909).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosa Smith Eigenmann</span> American ichthyologist

Rosa Smith Eigenmann was an American ichthyologist, as well as a writer, editor, former curator at the California Academy of Sciences, and the first librarian of the San Diego Society of Natural History. She "is considered the first woman ichthyologist in the United States." Eigenmann was also the first woman to become president of Indiana University's chapter of Sigma Xi, an honorary science society. She authored twelve published papers of her own between 1880 and 1893, and collaborated with her husband, Carl H. Eigenmann, as "Eigenmann & Eigenmann" on twenty-five additional works between 1888 and 1893. Together, they are credited with describing about 150 species of fishes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">San Diego Natural History Museum</span> Natural history museum in California

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Pearsall Carpenter</span> English minister, malacologist and conchologist

Philip Pearsall Carpenter was an English minister who emigrated to Canada, where his field work as a malacologist or conchologist is still well regarded today. A man of many talents, he wrote, published, taught, and was a volunteer explaining the growing study of shells in North America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reid Venable Moran</span> American botanist (1916–2010)

Reid Venable Moran was an American botanist and the curator of botany at the San Diego Natural History Museum from 1957 to 1982.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Léon Diguet</span> French naturalist

Léon Diguet was a French naturalist.

<i>Dudleya attenuata</i> Species of succulent

Dudleya attenuata is a species of perennial succulent plant known by the common name taper-tip liveforever, native to Baja California and a small portion of California. A rosette-forming leaf succulent, it has narrow pencil shaped leaves that can often be found covered in a white epicuticular wax. The thin, sprawling stems branch to form the clusters of rosettes, with plants creating a "clump" up to 40 cm wide. The small flowers are white or yellow, with 5 spreading petals. It is a diverse, variable species that extends from the southernmost coast of San Diego County to an area slightly north of the Vizcaino Desert, hybridizing with many other species of Dudleya in its range. Some plants with white or pinkish flowers were referred to as Orcutt's liveforever, referring to a former subspecies split on the basis of the flower color.

Frederick Baker was an American physician and civic activist in San Diego, California. He was the prime mover in founding the Marine Biological Institution, which became the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He was also a co-founder of the Zoological Society of San Diego and thus of the San Diego Zoo. He was a naturalist and an amateur malacologist.

George Edmund Lindsay was an American botanist, naturalist, and museum director. From 1956 to 1963, he was director of the San Diego Natural History Museum and served as Director of the California Academy of Sciences from 1963 to 1982. At both institutions, Lindsay led research field expeditions to the islands in the Sea of Cortez found between the Baja California Peninsula and mainland Sonora, Mexico. These expeditions relied on the Vermilion Sea Field Station at Bahia del Los Angeles as their base of operations, which he facilitated and organized. He was active in transnational conservation efforts to protect the islands as biodiversity sanctuaries in the Gulf of California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles F. Harbison</span> American entomologist

Charles F. Harbison (1904–1989) was an American entomologist and the curator of entomology at the San Diego Natural History Museum from 1942 to 1969. An avid field naturalist and researcher, Harbison influenced a generation of San Diego-born scientists in many fields of natural history through the Junior Naturalist program at the museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethel Bailey Higgins</span> American botanist

Ethel Bailey Higgins was an American botanist and the curator of botany at the San Diego Natural History Museum from 1943 to 1957; she continued to serve as associate curator from 1957 to 1963. Higgins authored Our Native Cacti (1931), and other popular works on plants of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ira Loren Wiggins</span> American botanist (1899–1987)

Ira Loren Wiggins was an American botanist, Curator of the Dudley Herbarium, and Director of the Natural History Museum (1940–1962) at Stanford University. He was a Stanford faculty member from 1929 until his retirement in 1964. He was the first recipient of the Fellow's Medal of the California Academy of Sciences. His Flora of Baja California is a standard work on the botany of the Baja peninsula and on the many islands of the Gulf of California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Stephens (naturalist)</span>

Frank Stephens (1849–1937) was an American naturalist and the first director of the San Diego Natural History Museum. He was considered the pioneer naturalist of the Southwest, studying the mammals and birds of California, Arizona, and Baja California. His personal specimen collection of 2,000 birds and mammals, donated in 1910, was the foundation of the San Diego Natural History Museum's Birds & Mammals Department, now a major resource on bird and mammal species of western North America, including Baja California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Cleveland</span>

Daniel Cleveland was an American lawyer, politician, civic leader and botanist.

<i>Myrtillocactus cochal</i> Species of plant

Myrtillocactus cochal, the candelabra cactus, is a species of flowering plant in the family Cactaceae, native to Baja California. Individuals can reach 3 m (10 ft), and are hardy to USDA zone 9b.

References

  1. 1 2 "Charles Orcutt". San Diego Natural History Museum. Retrieved 7 October 2016.
  2. "Charles Russell Orcutt papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California". Online Archive of California. Retrieved 8 October 2016.
  3. 1 2 List of Eponymous Species San Diego Natural History Museum
  4. "Early Woman Physician Passes at Coronado". San Diego Union. 9 Mar 1952. p. 4.
  5. Bullard, Anne D. (Winter 1994). "Charles Russell Orcutt: Pioneer naturalist". Journal of San Diego History. 42 (2).
  6. Coan, Eugene (1966). "Charles Russell Orcutt, pioneer California malacologist, and The Western American Scientist". Transactions of the San Diego Society of Natural History. 14 (8): 85–96.
  7. Archives, Smithsonian Institution; sysadmin. "SIA RU007088, Orcutt, Charles Russell 1864-1929, Charles Russell Orcutt Papers, 1926-1929". si.edu.
  8. Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. ISBN   978-1-4214-0135-5. ("Orcutt", p. 195).
  9. International Plant Names Index.  Orcutt.