• DOI:10.1038/141072c0
• Corpus ID: 4074772

James Eights: a Pioneer Antarctic Naturalist

@article{1938JamesEA,
  title={James Eights: a Pioneer Antarctic Naturalist},
  author={},
  journal={Nature},
  year={1938},
  volume={141},
  pages={72-72}
}

• Published 1 January 1938
• History
• Nature

DR. W. T. CALMAN has done worthy service to the memory of an American naturalist of the early nineteenth century in his presidential address to the Linnean Society (Proc. Linn. Soc., 149, 171; 1937). The accuracy of the descriptions and drawings made by James Eights, his discovery of a ten-legged pycnogon (Decolopoda), in which no one believed until the rediscovery of the species by the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition almost seventy years later, his discovery of a new seal and a new dolphin, neither of which he named, his description of the breeding of the king penguin, and of the South Shetland Islands, all mark him as a naturalist of keen perception. It is unfortunate that the appearance of his descriptions in journals not readily accessible should have obscured and delayed the recognition of his merit, and more sad to learn that in his own country he dropped out of the current and lived for a quarter of a century, until his death in 1882, in loneliness, obscurity and poverty.