William Berryman Scott (b. 1858, d. 1947) was born in Cincinnati
on February 12, 1858. His ties to Princeton University began before his
birth and lasted throughout his lifetime. His father, Rev. McKendree
Scott, was a student at the Princeton Theological Seminary and his
mother, Mary Elizabeth Hodge, was the daughter of a Princeton
Theological Seminary professor.
A sickly child, he
spent his early years reading under the tutelage of his mother. When he
was 15 years old, Scott passed the oral entrance examination to enter
Princeton as a member of the Class of 1877. It was at Princeton that
Scott began a life-long friendship with Henry Fairfield Osborn and
Francis Speir; the 3 were inseparable and were given the nickname “The
Triumvirate” by their classmates.
In their junior year, they were inspired by a Harper’s Magazine article describing O.C. Marsh’s Yale College Scientific Expeditions
and decided to undertake their own expedition to the West in search of
fossil vertebrates. Planning continued throughout their senior year,
and in the summer of 1877 the first Princeton Scientific Expedition set
out for Colorado and Wyoming.
Scott continued to lead
similar expeditions for a short time thereafter, but found no enjoyment
in the hardships of fieldwork. With the arrival of John Bell Hatcher
in 1893, Scott basically gave up fieldwork altogether, leaving Hatcher
to oversee that aspect of the E.M. Museum’s burgeoning vertebrate
paleontology collection.
As was the practice of the
day, Scott went to Europe a year after graduating from Princeton to
continue his studies under such notables as Huxley, Balfour and
Gegenbauer. He returned in 1880 to his alma mater, accepting a faculty
appointment to teach geology. Osborn, having followed a similar path,
accepted an appointment to teach biology. Scott spent the next 50 years
teaching at Princeton, holding the appointment of Blair Professor of
Geology and Paleontology from 1884 until his retirement in 1930 and
similarly serving for 26 years as Chairman of the Department of Geology
from its inception in 1904. His teaching was mostly confined to
undergraduate courses, but he did oversee a few graduate students
during his long career, including E.S. Riggs, J.W. Gidley, L.S.
Russell, and Glenn L. Jepsen.
Scott published some 150 scientific papers and reports, as well as
several nontechnical books, during his lifetime. He was editor for the
Reports of the Princeton University Expeditions to Patagonia, authoring
the Astrapotheria and Primates sections, as well as the overview on the
“Nature and Origin of the Santa Cruz Fauna.” His autobiography, Some Memories of a Paleontologist, tells of his early life and his years at Princeton; his An Introduction to Geology was used for years as one of the standard classroom college level texts; his A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere is considered a classic in mammalian paleontology.