Henry A. Ward: Museum Builder to America (The Rochester Historical Society Publications Volume XXIV [24])

Gilt on spine rubbed, rear board lightly soiled. 1948 Hard Cover. xxiv, 297 pp. 8vo. Green cloth, gilt titles and rules. Illustrated with black-and-white photographic plates. A biography of the naturalist and geologist, University of Rochester professor, and founder of Ward's Natural Science, a business which collected artifacts to be sold to museums. "Henry Augustus Ward (1834-1906) was an American naturalist and geologist, born in Rochester, New York. After attending Williams College and the Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard, where he was an assistant of Louis Agassiz, he traveled in Egypt, Arabia, and Palestine, and studied at the Jardin des Plantes, the Sorbonne, and the School of Mines in Paris, and at the universities of Munich and Freiberg. Subsequently, he traveled in West Africa and the West Indies, making natural history collections. In 1860, he returned to Rochester where he was professor at the University of Rochester until 1865. In Rochester, he founded Ward's Natural Science, a pioneer enterprise of its kind, which collected specimens from all parts of the world, and then mounted and sold them to colleges and museums. In 1897, he married a widow, Lydia Avery (Coonley), (1845-1924), president of the Chicago Woman's Club in 1895-96, who wrote Under the Pines, and other Verses (1895); Singing Verses for Children (1897); Love Songs (1898). He died on July 4, 1906, after being struck by an automobile in Buffalo, New York becoming Buffalo's first automobile related fatality. His ashes were interred in Mount Hope Cemetery amongst a large boulder he found in Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada until they were stolen. Ward's brain was contributed to the Wilder Brain Collection at Cornell University.…