Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Deane, James (naturalist)

Deane, James, naturalist, b. in Coleraine, Mass., 14 Feb., 1801; d. in Greenfield, 8 June, 1858. He passed his early life on his father's farm, and in 1822 removed to Greenfield, where, after writing for four years in a lawyer's office, he studied medicine. He was graduated as M. D. in 1831, and practised from that date until his death. In the spring of 1835 he discovered fossil footprints in the red sandstone of the Connecticut valley, and, having called the attention of scientific men to the fact, his investigations were afterward extended by Prof. Edward Hitchcock and others. American geologists were soon convinced of the genuineness of the footprints; but those in England were skeptical until a box of impressions, with a communication, had been sent by Dr. Deane to Dr. G. A. Mantell, by whom they were placed before the Geological society of London. At the time of his death he was about publishing an illustrated work embodying the results of twenty-four years of geological study and labor, which has since been issued by the Smithsonian institution. He contributed frequently to Silliman's "Journal" and the Boston "Medical and Surgical Journal," and was the author of a paper on the "Hygienic Condition of the Survivors of Ovariotomy," in which he favored the morality of the operation.