JOSEPH

See also:

• JOSEPH LEIDY (1823–1891)

LEIDY (1823–1891)  , American naturalist and palaeontologist, was born in Philadelphia on the 9th of September 1823 . He studied mineralogy and botany without an instructor, and graduated in medicine at the university of Pennsylvania in 1844 . Continuing his work in anatomy and physiology, he visited Europe in 1848, but both before and after this period of foreign study lectured and taught in American medical colleges . In 18J3 he was appointed professor of anatomy in the university of Pennsylvania, paying special attention to comparative anatomy . In 1884 he promoted the establishment in the same institution of the department of biology, of which he became director, and meanwhile taught natural history in Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia . His papers on biology and palaeontology were very numerous, covering both fauna and flora, and ranging from microscopic forms of animal life to the higher vertebrates . He wrote also occasional papers on minerals . He was an active member of the Boston Society of Natural History and of the American Philosophical Society; and was the recipient of various American and foreign degrees and honours . His Cretaceous Reptiles of the United States (1865) and Contributions to the Extinct Vertebrate Fauna of the Western Territories (1873) were the most important of his larger works; the best known and most widely circulated was an Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy (186o, afterwards revised in new editions) . He died in Philadelphia on the 3oth of April 1891 . See Memoir and portrait in Amer . Geologist, vol. ix .

(

Jan . 1892) and Bibliography in vol. viii . (Nov . 1891) and Memoir by H . C . Chapman in Proc . Acad . Nat . Sc . (Philadelphia, 1891), p . 342 .