1870–1880
The seventh decade was productive of comparatively few great names in the history of our science, but two, J. A. Ryder and Samuel W. Williston, being notable contributors. The former produced but few papers and those between 1877 and 1892, yet they were of note and such was their influence that he is named with Hyatt, Packard, and Cope as one of the founders of the Neo-Lamarckian School of evolutionists in America. Ryder was a particular friend and a colleague of Cope, as they were both concerned with the back-boned animals, while the other two were invertebratists. Ryder wrote on mechanical genesis of tooth forms and on scales of fishes, also on the morphology and evolution of the tails of fishes, cetaceans, and sirenians, and of the other fins of aquatic types. He did, on the other hand, practically no systematic or descriptive work.
Williston, on the contrary, has had a long and varied career as an investigator and as an educator. Trained at Yale, he prepared for medicine, and much of his teaching has been of human anatomy, both at Yale and at the University of Kansas where he served for a number of years as dean of the Medical School. He is also a student of flies, and as such not only the foremost but indeed almost the only dipterologist in the United States. But it is with his work as a vertebrate paleontologist that we are chiefly concerned, and here again he stands among the foremost. His initial work and training in this department of science were with Marsh, for whom he spent many months in field work, collecting largely in the Niobrara Cretaceous of Kansas. He did, however, no research while with Marsh, owing to the latter’s disinclination to foster such work on the part of his associates. Williston began his publications in 1878 and has continued them until the present, working mainly with Cretaceous mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterodactyls. Of late, since his transference to the University of Chicago, where as professor of paleontology and director of the Walker Museum he has served since 1902, his interest has lain mainly among the Paleozoic reptiles and amphibia. Williston’s more notable works are American Permian Vertebrates and Water Reptiles of the Past and Present, wherein he sets forth his views of the phylogenesis and taxonomy of the reptilian class. He is at present at work on the evolution of the reptiles, a volume which is eagerly awaited by his colleagues. It is in morphology that Williston’s greatest strength lies and some of his most effective work on the mosasaurs has appeared in the Journal.