Page:The Biographical Dictionary of America, vol. 07.djvu/281

 MARSH

MARSH

^^/^uy^^^t^-^'*'*^'^

furbied a partnership with Oscar W. Sturtevant, Daniel Webster at one time being a member of the firm. He became successively a law partner of John T. Hoffman, and William H. Leonard and a member of the firm of Marsh, Coe & Wallis. He

was married, Sept. 15, 1845, to Jane E., daughter of Alvan Stewart (q.v.) of New York. He retired from the practice of law in 1888. He was appointed by the New York legislature in 1882 a member of the New York park com- mission, and drew up the bills for "New Parks for New York City "and "The In- ternational Reserva- tion at Niagara Falls." He was chairman of the commission to lay out the parks in upper New York in 1883, and chairman of the board to appraise their value in 1884. He was also chairman of the committee to estimate the value of the lands for the Interna- tional park at Niagara Falls in 1885, and pub- lished in conjunction with John Mullaly " Re- poi't of the New York Park Commission of 1883 " (1884). He devoted himself to the investigation of the claims of Swedenborg for fifty years and of spiritualists from 1888, and through the im- posture of an alleged medium, known as Dis De- bar, his property was lost and he became mildly insane and was sent to the Middletovvn, N.Y., re- treat. He became a member of the Union League Club of New York in 1868, served as its vice-president, and was a stanch supporter of the Republican party from its organiza- tion. He edited the Sledgehammer, a Whig campaign paper at Utica, N.Y., in 1840, wrote leaders for the New York Times, 1852-53, and declined the editorship of the newspaper in 1869. He edited a volume of "Speeches on Slavery," by his father-in-law Alvan Stewart, (1860). He is the author of TJie Voice of the Patriarchs (1889), which is the first volume of a series entitled Glimpses in the Upper Sphere, professing to be a narrative of interviews with prominent characters of the Bible. This work is illustrated by portraits claimed to be taken of spirit subjects by photography. In 1892 he began a series of articles in the Conglomerate, a weekly paper issued by the inmates of the Middletown retreat, entitled : Recollections of the Bar and Sj^rifikles of Biography, 1892-95 ; he wrote also an Oration on General WoofJhnll (1848). He died in Middletown, N.Y., Aug. 5, 1902.

/^^^.iz^.^

MARSH, Othniel Charles, naturalist, was born at Lockport, N.Y., Oct. 29, 1831 ; son of Caleb and Mary Gaines (Peabody) Marsh ; grand- son of John and Mary (Brown) Marsh, and a descendant of John Marsh who came from Eng- land in the Mary and John in 1633, and settled in Salem, Mass., where he mar- ried Susanna, daugh- ter of the Rev. Samuel Skelton in 1635. Oth- niel attended Phil- lips Andover aca- demy, 1852-56, was graduated at Yale, A.B., 1860, A.M., 1864, and continued his studies at the Yale scientific school, 1860-62, where he made an important

discovery in palaeontology, describing the fosaurus acadianus, a large reptile from tlie coal formation of Nova Scotia. He studied in the Universities of Heidelberg, Breslau and Berlin, 1862-65, and was the first professor of palaeon- tology at Yale, 1866-99. He devoted himself to the special investigation of the extinct vertebrate animals of the Rocky Mountain district, and nearly every year from 1868 organized and led scientific expeditions into this region. He became U.S. palaeontologist in 1882, and from that year conducted these expeditions under the auspices of the U.S. government. In these explorations more than 1000 new species of vertebrates were discovered, 300 of which were described by Mr. Marsh in the American Journal of Science. Between 1890-99 he devoted himself to the geol- ogy of the region between the Appalachian mountain system and the Atlantic ocean. In 1875 he discovered and exposed the frauds prac- tised by government agents on the Indians and his action resulted in the resignation of the secretary of the interior. Among the extinct vertebrates discovered by him are the odon- tornithes, cretaceous birds having teeth ; the dinocerata, six-horned animals of the eocene period, and elephantine in bulk ; the earliest ancestors of the horse, eohippus. orohippus and epihippus ; the firet known American pterodactyls or flying lizards ; the brontotheriida*. a new family of ungulates from the miocene period ; the first mammals of the Jurassic period found in America, together with new families of dinosauria and some enormous reptiles, and a large variety of American monkeys, bats and marsupials. Projiably his most conspicuous scientific achievements are his tracing of the phylogeny of the horse, and h\z