Samuel Hubbard Scudder
Samuel Hubbard Scudder was an American entomologist and paleontologist. He was a leading figure in entomology during his lifetime and the founder of insect paleontology in America. In addition to fossil insects, he was an authority on grasshoppers. Scudder was born on April 13, 1837 in Boston, the son of Charles Scudder and Sarah Lathrop Scudder, his father was a successful merchant and both parents had Puritan roots dating back to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1620s. He was raised in a strict Calvinist Congregational household. One of his younger brothers, Horace Scudder became a noted author and editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Scudder attended Boston Latin School and enrolled in Williams College in 1853 at the age of sixteen, he studied with geologist Ebenezer Emmons. Under their influence, Scudder developed an interest in natural history entomology, he became an ardent collector of butterflies in the nearby Berkshire Hills. By the age of nineteen Scudder was committed to pursuing a career studying insects.
Scudder graduated from Williams in 1847 at the head of his class. He entered the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard to study under Louis Agassiz, the most influential scientist in America at the time. After studying with Agassiz for four years he received a B. S. degree in 1862 and continued to work for Agassiz for another two years. Around this time Darwin's theory of evolution was debated in American scientific circles. Agassiz remained a staunch opponent of evolution while Scudder, after siding with Agassiz view came to accept Darwin's theory and build it into his entomological work. Scudder became a leading figure in American entomology and was noted for his work with grasshoppers and insect paleontology. Although he made significant contributions in all these areas, many of his contemporaries felt Scudder was most notable for his study of grasshoppers, he was a world authority on Orthoptera classification and distribution. In 1862 he wrote his first paper on the topic. During his career he described 106 genera and 630 species.
Willis Blatchley said “to him more than to all his predecessors and contemporaries combined is due our present knowledge of the Orthoptera.”In 1889 Scudder completed his monumental treatise, Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada incorporating thirty years of work on the physiology, life history and classification of butterflies. This publication cemented his reputation as a leading lepidopterist of his day and remained a standard and influential work for many years. In addition to numerous scientific papers, Scudder wrote several popular accounts of butterflies for the general public. In 1865 Scudder wrote his first paper on Devonian Insects of New Brunswick. After the Civil War the extensive explorations of the US Geological Survey led to the discovery of many fossil insects. From 1886 to 1892 Scudder was employed as the staff paleontologist to analyze and publish these findings for the USGS, his extensive work was summarized in The Fossil Insects of North America and in 1891 he prepared a valuable index of the fossil insects of the world.
Scudder described more than 1100 new species of fossil insects and wrote 122 papers on the subject. Beginning in 1862, Scudder had a long association with the Boston Society of Natural History where he served in various roles including recording secretary, custodian, vice president, president, he worked as an assistant librarian at Harvard from 1879 to 1882 and held the office of librarian for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His interest in librarianship and bibliography led him to compile and publish in 1879 a catalog of scientific serials of all countries from 1633 to 1876, he published Nomenclator Zoologicus, a seminal and comprehensive list of all generic names in zoology, including insects. In other contributions Scudder was co-founder of the Cambridge Entomological Club and its journal Psyche. In 1867 Scudder married Ethelinda Jane Blatchford who died in 1872, their only son, was close to his father and accompanied him on many of his field trips. Gardner died of tuberculosis in 1896.
At about the same time Scudder first showed signs of Parkinson's disease and by 1902 his disability forced him to retire. He gifted his personal insect collections to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and his library to the Boston Society of Natural History, he died in Boston on May 1911 after several years of seclusion. Scudder was a prolific writer, publishing 791 papers between 1858 and 1902, his primary focus was the descriptive taxonomy of insects and insect fossils. He wrote about insect biogeography and paleobiogeography, insect behavior and phylogeny, insect songs and insect biology. In addition to his scientific works, Scudder wrote several popular books and articles on butterflies; some of his more notable titles include: Nomenclator Zoologicus Butterflies: Their Structure and Life Histories Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada The Fossil Insects of North America Index to the Known Fossil Insects of the World Tertiary Rhync
Financial District, Boston
The Financial District of Boston is located in Downtown Boston, near Government Center and Chinatown. Like many areas within Boston, the Financial District has no official definition, it is bounded by Atlantic Avenue, State Street, Devonshire Street. Parts of the Financial District are in various USPS postal ZIP Codes, including 02108, 02109, 02110, 02111; the area includes Post Office Square, the Exchange Place and International Place complexes, the landmark Custom House Tower, borders Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall. The Financial District contains the headquarters of the mutual fund companies Fidelity Investments, Putnam Investments, DWS Scudder Investments. C. RSM McGladrey, BDO USA, LLP. Dewey Square, One Financial Center, the plaza and towers housing the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston are located near South Station, adjacent to and just south of the area defined above. Part of the Financial District are 33 Arch Street, One Federal Street, the First National Bank Building, 100 Summer Street, 101 Federal Street.
The area contains many of Boston's highrise buildings in a densely packed area more than the Back Bay which contains Boston's two tallest highrises, the Prudential Tower and 200 Clarendon Street. There has been some recent construction in the area. Russia Wharf was completed along the Fort Channel and rises up to 395 feet and 32 stories. Construction of South Station Tower has been put on hold. If completed the tower would rise to 41 stories. One Franklin Street has been reworked by developers and construction on a 600 ft tower will begin in the near future. Other towers in the area such as the Aquarium Garage Development and the Congress Street Towers if approved could change the Boston Skyline as well. Financial District, Boston travel guide from Wikivoyage
Back Bay, Boston
Back Bay is an recognized neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It is most famous for its rows of Victorian brownstone homes—considered one of the best preserved examples of 19th-century urban design in the United States—as well as numerous architecturally significant individual buildings, cultural institutions such as the Boston Public Library, it is a fashionable shopping destination and home to Boston's tallest office buildings, the Hynes Convention Center, numerous major hotels. The Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay considers the neighborhood's bounds to be "Charles River on the North. Today, along with neighboring Beacon Hill, it is one of Boston's two most expensive residential neighborhoods. Before its transformation into buildable land by a 19th-century filling project, the Back Bay was a bay, west of the Shawmut Peninsula between Boston and Cambridge, the Charles River entering from the west; this bay was tidal: the water rose and fell several feet over the course of each day, at low tide much of the bay's bed was exposed as a marshy flat.
As early as 5,200 years before present, Native Americans built fish weirs here, evidence of, discovered during subway construction in 1913. In 1814, the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation was chartered to construct a milldam, which would serve as a toll road connecting Boston to Watertown, bypassing Boston Neck; the dam prevented the natural tides from flushing sewage out to sea, creating severe sanitiary and odor problems. With costs higher and power lower than expected, in the end, the project was an economic failure, in 1857 a massive project was begun to "make land" by filling the area enclosed by the dam; the firm of Goss and Munson built additional railroad trackage extending to quarries in Needham, Massachusetts, 9 miles away. Twenty-five 35-car trains arrived every 24 hours carrying gravel and other fill, at a rate in the daytime of one every 45 minutes. Present-day Back Bay itself was filled by 1882. Much of the old mill dam remains buried under present-day Beacon Street; the project was the largest of a number of land reclamation projects which, beginning in 1820, more than doubled the size of the original Shawmut Peninsula.
Completion of the Charles River Dam in 1910 converted the former Charles estuary into a freshwater basin. The Esplanade has since undergone several changes, including the construction of Storrow Drive; the Back Bay is traversed by five east-west corridors: Beacon Street, Marlborough Street, Commonwealth Avenue, Newbury Street and Boylston Street. These are interrupted at regular intervals by north–south streets named alphabetically: Arlington, Clarendon, Exeter, Fairfield and Hereford Streets. All of the west-east streets, except Commonwealth Avenue, are one-way streets. In the 1960s, the "High Spine" design plan, in conjunction with development plans, gave way to the construction of high-rise buildings along the Massachusetts Turnpike, which in turn allowed the development of major projects in the area; the plan of Back Bay, by Arthur Gilman of the firm Gridley James Fox Bryant, was influenced by Haussmann's renovation of Paris, with wide, tree-lined avenues unlike anything seen in other Boston neighborhoods.
Five east-west corridors—Beacon Street, Marlborough Street, Commonwealth Avenue, Newbury Street and Boylston Street—are intersected at regular intervals by north-south cross streets: Arlington, Clarendon, Exeter, Fairfield and Hereford. An 1874 guidebook noted the trisyllabic-disyllabic alternation of that alphabetic sequence. West of Hereford are Massachusetts Avenue and Charlesgate, which forms the Back Bay's western boundary. Setback requirements and other restrictions, written into the lot deeds of the newly filled Back Bay, produced harmonious rows of dignified three- and four-story residential brownstones; the Back Bay is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is considered one of the best-preserved examples of 19th-century urban architecture in the United States. In 1966, the Massachusetts Legislature, "to safeguard the heritage of the city of Boston by preventing the despoliation" of the Back Bay, created the Back Bay Architectural District to regulate exterior changes to Back Bay buildings.
Since the 1960s, the concept of a High Spine has inf
Georges Cuvier
Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier, known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils. Cuvier's work is considered the foundation of vertebrate paleontology, he expanded Linnaean taxonomy by grouping classes into phyla and incorporating both fossils and living species into the classification. Cuvier is known for establishing extinction as a fact—at the time, extinction was considered by many of Cuvier's contemporaries to be controversial speculation. In his Essay on the Theory of the Earth Cuvier proposed that now-extinct species had been wiped out by periodic catastrophic flooding events. In this way, Cuvier became the most influential proponent of catastrophism in geology in the early 19th century.
His study of the strata of the Paris basin with Alexandre Brongniart established the basic principles of biostratigraphy. Among his other accomplishments, Cuvier established that elephant-like bones found in the USA belonged to an extinct animal he would name as a mastodon, that a large skeleton dug up in Paraguay was of Megatherium, a giant, prehistoric ground sloth, he named the pterosaur Pterodactylus, described the aquatic reptile Mosasaurus, was one of the first people to suggest the earth had been dominated by reptiles, rather than mammals, in prehistoric times. Cuvier is remembered for opposing theories of evolution, which at the time were proposed by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Cuvier believed there was no evidence for evolution, but rather evidence for cyclical creations and destructions of life forms by global extinction events such as deluges. In 1830, Cuvier and Geoffroy engaged in a famous debate, said to exemplify the two major deviations in biological thinking at the time – whether animal structure was due to function or morphology.
Cuvier rejected Lamarck's thinking. His most famous work is Le Règne Animal. In 1819, he was created a peer for life in honor of his scientific contributions. Thereafter, he was known as Baron Cuvier, he died in Paris during an epidemic of cholera. Some of Cuvier's most influential followers were Louis Agassiz on the continent and in the United States, Richard Owen in Britain, his name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower. Cuvier was born in Montbéliard, where his Protestant ancestors had lived since the time of the Reformation, his mother was Anne Clémence Chatel. At the time, the town, annexed to France on 10 October 1793, belonged to the Duchy of Württemberg, his mother, much younger than his father, tutored him diligently throughout his early years, so he surpassed the other children at school. During his gymnasium years, he had little trouble acquiring Latin and Greek, was always at the head of his class in mathematics and geography. According to Lee, "The history of mankind was, from the earliest period of his life, a subject of the most indefatigable application.
At the age of 10, soon after entering the gymnasium, he encountered a copy of Conrad Gessner's Historiae Animalium, the work that first sparked his interest in natural history. He began frequent visits to the home of a relative, where he could borrow volumes of the Comte de Buffon's massive Histoire Naturelle. All of these he read and reread, retaining so much of the information, that by the age of 12, "he was as familiar with quadrupeds and birds as a first-rate naturalist." He remained at the gymnasium for four years. Cuvier spent an additional four years at the Caroline Academy in Stuttgart, where he excelled in all of his coursework. Although he knew no German on his arrival, after only nine months of study, he managed to win the school prize for that language. Cuvier's German education exposed him to the work of the geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner, whose Neptunism and emphasis on the importance of rigorous, direct observation of three-dimensional, structural relationships of rock formations to geological understanding provided models for Cuvier's scientific theories and methods.
Upon graduation, he had no money on. So in July 1788, he took a job at Fiquainville chateau in Normandy as tutor to the only son of the Comte d'Héricy, a Protestant noble. There, during the early 1790s, he began his comparisons of fossils with extant forms. Cuvier attended meetings held at the nearby town of Valmont for the discussion of agricultural topics. There, he became acquainted with Henri Alexandre Tessier, he had been a physician and well-known agronomist, who had fled the Terror in Paris. After hearing Tessier speak on agricultural matters, Cuvier recognized him as the author of certain articles on agriculture in the Encyclopédie Méthodique and addressed him as M. Tessier. Tessier replied in dismay, "I am known and lost."—"Lost!" Replied M. Cuvier, "no, they soon became intimate and Tessier introduced Cuvier to his colleagues in Paris—"I have just found a pearl in the dungh
F. W. P. Greenwood
Francis William Pitt Greenwood was a Unitarian minister of King's Chapel in Boston, Massachusetts. Born in Boston, Greenwood graduated from Harvard College in 1814, after studying theology under Henry Ware Jr. he became pastor of New South Church in October, 1818. He left this position after about a year, following a sudden illness of "bleeding from the lungs," and spent nearly two years in England. After returning to the United States in 1821, he lived for a time in Baltimore, where he preached in the pulpit of the Unitarian Church led by his friend, Rev. Jared Sparks and married Maria Goodwin of Baltimore, by whom they had one son. In the summer of 1824, he returned to Boston to become associate minister of King's Chapel, serving under his mentor, James Freeman, of whom he would write his biography. In 1827, following Freeman's death, Greenwood revised the church's liturgy and prepared a popular hymnbook, adopted by many other churches. During his tenure, he established a Sunday School for children of the parish.
His pastorate was interrupted various times by a recurrence of illness, in 1837, he traveled to Cuba on the advice of doctors. He edited the Christian Examiner throughout the 1820s and 1830s, his 1826 series, "Letters on Missions," was noted as being controversial for its severity in tone. Greenwood's writings were published in the Boston Journal of Natural History and The Token and Atlantic Souvenir, he preached his last sermon on May 22, 1842, at a church in Salem and died August 2, 1843, at the age of 46, due to his lingering illness. His sermons were published in 1844 in two volumes by his friend a parishioner, former Boston Mayor Samuel A. Eliot. A Sermon delivered on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Boston Female Asylum, Sept. 23, 1825. Greenwood and G. B. Emerson, eds; the classical reader. 1826. Funeral sermon on the late Hon. Christopher Gore: governor of Massachusetts. Preached at King's Chapel, March 11, 1827. Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1827. Lives of the twelve apostles. 1828. Prayer for the Sick: A Sermon Preached at King's Chapel, Boston, on Thursday, August 9, 1932, Being the Fast Day Appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts, On Account of the Appearance of Cholera in the United States.
Boston: L. C. Bowles, 1832. A History of King's Chapel, in Boston. 1833. Memoir of the Rev. James Freeman. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 1836. Spring; the Token and Atlantic Souvenir. 1838. A Description of the principal fruits of Cuba. Boston Journal of Natural History, Volume 2. 1839. The Sea; the Boston Book, Volume 3. Boston: Light and Horton, 1841. Sermons to Children. Boston: James Munroe, 1841; the Spirit's Song of Consolation. American common-place book of poetry. 1841. Sermons of the Rev. F. W. P. Greenwood, in Two Volumes. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1844.2nd ed. 1835. 3rd ed. 1846. N. L. Frothingham, Sermon preached in King's Chapel, August 4, 1843, the Sunday after the funeral of the Rev. F. W. P. Greenwood "Greenwood's Miscellaneous Writings", Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany, November 1846 Lamb's Biographical Dictionary of the United States, 3, Boston: James H. Lamb Co. 1900, pp. 405–406 WorldCat. Greenwood, F. W. P. 1797-1843
Newbury Street
Newbury Street is located in the Back Bay area of Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. It runs east-to-west, from the Boston Public Garden to Brookline Avenue; the road crosses many major arteries along its path, with an entrance to the Mass Pike westbound at Mass Ave. Newbury Street is a destination known for its many retail shops and restaurants. East of Massachusetts Avenue, Newbury Street is a mile-long street lined with historic 19th-century brownstones that contain hundreds of shops and restaurants, making it a popular destination for tourists and locals; the most "high-end boutiques" are located near the Boston Public Garden end of Newbury Street. As the address numbers climb, the shops become less expensive and more bohemian up to Mass Ave. West of Mass Ave the street abuts the Mass Pike on its unbuilt southern side. A proposed, major decking project over the Pike at the "annex" end would involve new structure for the southern side beyond the confines of the Mass. Ave. intersection.
This could allow for expansion of the shopping district. Newbury Street has an eclectic mix of eateries, its renovated brownstone buildings feature stores at all retail levels, -- physically and financially. There are trendy cafes and an array of restaurants to suit many tastes, yet due to the concentration of up-scale stores at its lower end, it is touted as one of the most expensive streets in the world. Donlyn Lyndon writes that west of Clarendon Street, Newbury Street's name celebrates the victory of the Puritans in the 1643 Battle of Newbury in the English Civil War. Newbury Street was one of the earliest roads in Boston, its portion was renamed Washington Street by the end of the 18th century; the current road was created during the filling in of Back Bay in the mid 19th century. The 1893 edition of Baedeker's United States catalogs Boston's "finest residence streets" as Commonwealth Avenue, Beacon Street, Marlborough Street, Newbury Street, Mt. Vernon Street. William J. Geddis, notes that it was "the least fashionable Street in Back Bay."
Owen Wister's novel, Philosophy 4, set in the 1870s, mentions Newbury Street: The first commercial establishments opened around 1905. By the late 1920s, lower Newbury Street had begun to establish itself as a destination for well-heeled society. With the establishment of Boston's Junior League in 1907, formal dances became fashionable, elegant apparel shops prospered. By 1911, 24 Newbury St. featured a salon for lessons in "social and aesthetic dance." As more retailers moved in, many lower floor shops began to feature wide glass windows to exhibit luxury goods. In the late 1950s fashionable boutiques included Darée, Charles Sumner, Miss Harvey and Joseph Antell. One of Newbury's oldest and most established retailers is the tony Brooks Brothers department store which occupies its original quarters at the corner of Berkeley St; the transformation that turned Newbury Street into a trendy shopping district for young people began in the 1970s with the opening of the original Newbury Comics. From 1970 until the late 1990s, lower Newbury Street was lined with posh up-and-coming art galleries.
Newbury Street mavens and hipsters spent Saturday afternoons gallery hopping and enjoying the ubiquitous "wine and cheese" art openings. The legendary music instrument retailer "E. U. Wurlitzer Music and Sound" was a part of the greater Boston music scene since 1890, the store had been located at 360 Newbury Street after moving from its LaGrange Street address in the mid-1960s; the building was a plain yellow-brick building by the time the company went out of business in the mid-1980s. In 1989, it was renovated under the direction of architect Frank Gehry and won the Parker Award as the most beautiful new building in Boston. According to architecture columnist Robert Campbell, Gehry "took a blandly forgettable building and transformed it into a monument... It's the first significant example in Boston of a movement known as deconstruction. Deconstructionist buildings are designed to look as if their parts are either colliding or exploding at crazy angles.""The Slab" is a large flat rectangle of concrete between the former JP Licks ice cream parlor and the Hynes Convention Center at Massachusetts Avenue.
In 2012, the Boston Business Journal announced that Clover Food Lab would lease the 275-square-foot sidewalk space for a year and open a café. However, the plan has not yet been realized as of November 2014. Once famous for a wealth of bookstores, like nearby Cambridge, has suffered a steady decline in the number and quality of independent booksellers; the beloved 150,000-volume Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop on Newbury Street, one of the last holdouts, closed in 2004. The youthful Trident Booksellers and Café on Newbury Street is amongst a small band of independent bookstores still remaining in Boston. Close to Berklee College of Music, Tower Records at 360 Newbury Street was a favorite spot among music lovers for over a decade. A 1991 Boston Globe article says that "Tower Records stomped into Boston with the nation's largest music store three years ago," while another says that "When Tower Records opened its astonishing store on Newbury Street, it altered the Boston compact disk market forever, remade Newbury Street's commercial scene."
Long the largest record and CD outlet in the Boston area, it was closed 2002, though the space was soon occupied by another huge music store, Virgin Megastore. Since the turn of the 21st Century, Newbury Street has maintained its transformative shopping experi
Horticultural Hall, Boston (1865)
Horticultural Hall of Boston, was the headquarters of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in the 19th century. It stood at no.100-102 Tremont Street, at the corner of Bromfield Street, opposite the Granary Burying Ground. Architects Gridley J. F. Bryant and Arthur Gilman designed the building. Sculptor Martin Milmore created horticulturally-themed statuary for the building's exterior: "three ancient Roman goddesses... Ceres, goddess of agriculture. In the 1880s: "the ground floor occupied by stores. Both of these halls used for concerts and the better class of entertainments; the society's library, comprising over 4,000 volumes, the most valuable collection of horticultural works in the United States. The halls adorned with portraits and busts of the presidents and benefactors of the society."By 1899 the society's rooms in the building seemed old-fashioned, small and expensive to maintain. After internal debate the society sold Horticultural Hall in 1900 and leased space there for some months thereafter.
In 1901 the society transferred to its new building in the Back Bay, the building on Tremont Street "was demolished" the same year. At the time, Milmore's architectural statues were removed to the home of society president Albert C. Burrage in Beverly, Massachusetts. In the mid-1990s the society restored Milmore's statues and installed them in their new headquarters in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Horticultural Hall, School Street, Boston Horticultural Hall, corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Huntington Avenue, Back Bay, Boston "Horticultural Hall, Boston". Harper's Weekly. 11. April 13, 1867. Bostonian Society. Photos: 100-122 Tremont Street, July 12, 1895 Tremont Street, 1895, Dec. 14, 1:45 pm Tremont Street, c. 1896-1901, Tremont Temple, Horticultural Hall in distance Tremont Street, c. 1907-1915, shows new building on site of former Horticultural Hall
