RAYMOND, PERCY EDWARD

(b. New Canaan, Connecticut, 30 May 1879; d. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 17 May 1952)

paleontology, geology.

Raymond entered Cornell University in 1897, intending to study engineering, but came under the influence of G. D. Harris; his interests then centered on paleontology, which soon became his lifework. He received the Ph.D. at Yale in 1904 and was appointed assistant curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. In 1910 he became paleontologist on the Geological Survey of Canada and in 1912 went to Harvard as assistant professor of paleontology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, rising to professor in 1929 and becoming emeritus in 1945.

Throughout his scientific career Raymond published extensively in paleontology, stratigraphy, and sedimentation. His interests in these fields ranged widely, and he described many new Paleozoic fossils belonging to nearly every major animal group. Although he made many important contributions to knowledge of the stratigraphy of the Canadian Rockies and the Appalachians, his lifelong specialty was the trilobites; he made detailed studies of their anatomy, ontogeny, and classification, which culminated in his monograph The Appendages, Anatomy and Relationships of Trilobites (1920). While much has since been learned of the morphology, life history, and ecology of these long-extinct marine arthropods, Raymond’s work remains a paleontological classic. In 1939 he published Prehistoric Life, an admirable and widely read summation of his concepts of organic evolution as exemplified by the fossil record, based on his years of teaching and research.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Raymond wrote more than 75 monographs and papers, the most important being The Appendages, Anatomy and Relationships of Trilobites, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences Memoir no. 7 (New Haven, 1920); and Prehistoric Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1939).

H. C. Stetson, “Memorial to Percy Edward Raymond,” in Proceedings. Geological Society of America, for 1952 (1953), 121–126, includes a portrait and a bibliography of published works.

John W. Wells