Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/576

NAME HORN 554 HORN son of Philip Henry and Frances Isabella Horn. His paternal grandfather came to America in 1798 from Prussia. His grand- mother was born in Carroll County, Mary- land. His father, Philip Henry Horn, born in Baltimore in 1812, went to Philadelphia about 1830, and after studying in the College of Pharmacy, established himself in a drug bu«;iness at the southwest corner of Fourth and Poplar Streets, where our worthy Dr. George Henry was born, lived and practised medicine. Horn went to the Central High School of Philadelphia in 1853; soon after finishing here, in 1858 he entered the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated March 14, 1861. Among his teach- ers were William Pepper, Sr., Joseph Leidy, Samuel Jackson, and Hugh S. Hodge. Horn practised medicine for a living and locally was well known as a successful obstetri- cian, but his heart was ever in his zoological work, begun while yet a medical student. He was of medium height, with bushy dark whiskers; slender and keen, with a nervous manner, a boundless energy, a most retentive memory, and thoroughly independent and self- reliant in his judgment and opinions, in many respects much like his contemporary, Edward D. Cope. He never married and he never made a pro- fession of any faith, seeming to lose interest in religion and a life beyond in his devotion to entomology. His first scientific paper was, "Descriptions of three new species of Gorgonidae," published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Horn soon found, however, his niche for life in the Entomological Society of Philadelphia, later the American Entomological Society, of which he became a member in 1860. Dr. John L. Le Conte (q. v.), the coleopterologist, pre- siding genius of the Society, soon became Horn's warm and life-long friend. Horn's first paper read here was entitled, "Descrip- tions of New North American Coleoptera in the Cabinet of the Entomological Society of Philadelphia," presented December 18, 1860, describing seven new forms. In 1862 during the Civil War he went to California and in March, 1863, was commis- sioned assistant surgeon of the Second Cavalry of the California Volunteers ; the service ter- minated in 1866. While in the west he still energetically pursued his collecting bent, find- ing the rare ".'Kmphizoa insolens" in California, and visiting Arizona. He returned to Phila- delphia in 1866 and was elected president of the Entomological Society; December 26th he presented some of the results of his four years in the west, beginning a series of papers on Coleoptera, continued for over thirty years. The year 1874 saw him in Europe visiting the Entomological Societies of London and Paris. Again in 1882 and 1888 he visited Europe in the summer months, meeting West- wood in Oxford, and David Sharp, In 1888 he met Dohrn in Stettin, and attended the meetings of the Paris Society as an honorary member. He refers with pride to the fact that he had thus been able to see more genera of Melolonthidae (Scarabs) than anyone. Although made professor of entomology in the faculty of biology of the University of Pennsylvania in 1889, when Edw. D. Cope was also chosen to fill the chair of mineralogy and geology, he never gave instruction under this election. Difficulty in hearing began in 1895 with other evidences of feebleness ; the 26th of October, 1896, saw him for the last time at the meet- ings of the Entomological Society. Stricken with paralysis in December, 1896, he died November 24, 1897. Horn's life was, as it were, engrafted into Le Conte's (1883), and Le Conte's collection formed the fruitful basis of Horn's extended and more intensive work. He added to the "Mihis" some 1.582 new species, and defined and reconstructed genera, doing his best work on the Carabidae (carnivorous beetles) and the Silphidae (burying beetles). The writer recalls particularly some gossip current at the Academy of Natural Sciences, where he was a frequent youthful visitor, to the effect that Horn had overhauled Le Conte's long list of type specimens with a resultant reduction of great numbers to the level of va- rieties ; Dr. Horace Jayne, an enthusiastic col- lector, asserted that some of Horn's finest work was done in connection with the mouth pieces of the Rhyncophera (weevils). He had an excellent artistic hand in conjunction with his work. Horn is praised by his French reviewer (Prendhaume de Borre at the Belgian Entomo- logical Society) as a man of greater breadth of view than many of the current "parish entomologists." His most general work was the "Classifi- cation of the Coleoptera of North America" (1883), said by Prof. Smith to represent the ripe experience of Le-Conte, the broader student of nature, with the critical accurate