SCIENTIST'S DEATH

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22261, 8 November 1935, Page 11

SCIENTIST'S DEATH

DR. H. F. OSBORN • VIEWS ON MAN'S ORIGIN (.Received November 7, 6.5 p.m.) NEW YORK, Nov. 6 The death has occurred of Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, scientist, author and explorer, aged 78. The late Dr. Osborn was a famous anthropologist. He was born at Fairfield, Connecticut, and educated at | Princeton University, where he took the B.A. and B.Sc. degrees. In 1881 he was appointed professor of natural science at Princeton and two years later was promoted to the comparative anatomy chair. It was soon recognised that he was a scientist of exceptional ability, and in the next 13 years he was professor of biology and zoology at Princeton and also for part or the period Dean of the Faculty of Pure Science at Columbia and curator of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology. In 1910 Princeton made Dr. Osborn its permanent research professor in zoology and later the Government employed him in a geological survey of the United States and eventually made him its senior geologist. Meanwhile he had been recording the results of his observations on prehistoric life, his first book being " From the Greeks to Darwin " (1894), and his second, " The Ago of Mammals " (1910). These were followed by " Men of the Old Stone .Ago " (1915), and " Origin and Evolution of Life " (1917). Until then Dr. Osborn was a supporter of Darwin's theory of the evolution of nfan from apo-liko creatures. Researches based on recent discoveries aroused doubts in his mind, however, and the results of explorations in the Gobi Desert of Central Asia seemed to him to justify these doubts. Ho accompanied Roy Chapman Andrews on one of his Gobi expeditions and the discoveries then made completed his change of view. In December, 1929, ho declared his conviction that man and monkey had no common ancestor and that the ape-man was a myth. Man, he held, had been human all through liis evolution, and he pictured the first man as having lived in the invigorating uplands of the Gobi Desert, a country totally unfitted for any form of anthropoid ape. He was convinced that further explorations by Andrews and himself would produce evidence that could not be assailed. Dr. Osborn received degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Columbia and Oslo.