Herbert Huntington Smith, one of the most famous collectors of natural history specimens, was born in Manlius, New York, on January 21, 1851. At the age of 17, he entered Cornell University, in Ithaca, N. Y., a renowned study center. In 1870, while still a student, he had the opportunity to travel to Brazil, as a participant in the Morgan Expedition, whose objective was to obtain “the largest quantity of specimens from all departments of nature”, but primarily geological. Morgan, a millionaire from Aurora, N. Y., was the expedition's patron. Charles Frederick Hartt, a well-known geologist, who had already participated in a previous expedition to Brazil with Louis Agassiz, was chosen as its director. In addition to botanist A. N. Prentiss, students W. S. Barnard, C.J. Powers, P. P. Stanton, P. M. Johnson, D. Wilmot, H. H. Smith, and Orville A. Derby. The latter would later settle in Brazil, dedicating himself to the study of Brazilian geology and paleontology. Members of the Morgan Expedition worked along the Amazon River valley to the Tapajós and Trombetas rivers.
Smith graduated from Cornell University in 1872. In 1874, he wanted to return to Brazil to collect and study the Amazon fauna. He spent two years in the vicinity of Santarém and exploring the tributaries on the left bank of the Amazon. At the end of this trip, he spent four months in Rio de Janeiro.
Back in the United States, he had the satisfaction of seeing one of his dreams come true: the New York “Scribner’s Magazine” commissioned him to write a series of articles about Brazil. With this objective, he made two more trips to that country, studying nature, political and social conditions, industries and the problem of drought in the Northeast. On one of his trips he was accompanied by the artist J. Wells Champney.
The articles published in “Scribner’s Magazine” were later rewritten and expanded, resulting in the book “Brazil: The Amazons and the Coast”, published in December 1879.
On October 5, 1880, Smith married Amelia Woolwirth, of Brooklyn, N. Y., also a natural scientist and an excellent taxidermist and insect preparer.
In 1881, Smith returned to Brazil, this time with his wife. In May of that year they arrived in Belém, Pará; They then went to Pernambuco, where they stayed for ten days and then went to Rio de Janeiro, where they stayed for six months, getting to know Emperor Dom Pedro II. The couple then embarked on a collecting trip, going down to Rio Grande, in Rio Grande do Sul. After exploring this state, they headed to Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Going up the Paraguay, Paraná and Apa rivers, they reached Corumbá, in the current state of Mato Grosso do Sul. From there, via the São Lourenço and Cuiabá rivers, they reached the capital of Mato Grosso, settling in the beautiful Chapada dos Guimarães. The Smiths remained there from 1882 to 1886, leaving on September 6, 1886, to return to the United States. During this trip, Smith wrote some articles for the “Gazeta de Notícias” in Rio de Janeiro, which were translated into Portuguese by Capistrano de Abreu; the first was published on June 21, 1886 and the last on October 20, 1887. These articles were bundled together in an interesting booklet, published in 1922, by Companhia Melhoramentos de São Paulo.
The collections made in Chapada and other neighboring locations were gigantic. estimated at 200,000 specimens, representing around 30,000 species. Frederick DuCane Godman, a renowned English naturalist, acquired part of these collections. Most of them, however, were acquired by the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. These collections included about 3,000 species of Hymenoptera (studied by Ashmead, Fox, Cresson, and others), 2,500 of Diptera (mostly studied and described by Williston), 2,600 of Lepidoptera (studied by Godman and Druce), 23,000 of Coleoptera (only partially studied by Champion), 3,300 of Hemiptera (studied by Uhler and Distant), 600 of Orthoptera, 300 of Neuroptera (sensu lato), 2,000 of Arachnida, and 230 of Crustacea.
In 1889, he was collecting again, this time in Mexico, for F. D. Godman, who, together with another British naturalist, Osbert Salvin, was assembling important natural history collections for the publication of the monumental series “Biologia Centrali-Americana.”
Between 1889 and 1895, Smith, hired by the West Indies Commission of the “Royal Society of London”, collected on the islands of Trinidad, Saint Vincent and Windward.
In addition to his duties as a traveling naturalist, Smith had been hired as a curator by the Carnegie Museum.
From 1898 to 1901, he undertook another collecting trip, this time to Colombia (mainly the Nevado de Santa Marta region) for the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. The collections were made over three and a half years, from March 1898 to September 1901.
Returning to his homeland, he resumed curating the Carnegie Museum, but not for long, as he went to Wetumpka, Alabama, to collect mollusks. In 1910, he was named curator of the Alabama Museum, remaining in that job for nearly a decade.
He died on March 22, 1919, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, struck by a train while collecting on the train tracks. Hard of hearing, he did not hear the on-rushing danger. 187.255.194.169 (talk) 13:55, 24 May 2024 (UTC)Reply
