The Biographical Dictionary of America/Abbott, Charles Conrad

ABBOTT, Charles Conrad, naturalist, was born at Trenton, N.J., June 4, 1843; son of Timothy and Susan (Conrad) Abbott; grandson of Joseph and Anne (Rickey) Abbott, and a descendant of John and Anne (Mauleverer) Abbott, settlers, from England, in New Jersey, 1684. He was educated at Trenton academy and graduated from the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1865, but never entered into the practice of the profession. In 1872 his attention was called to local archæology and having an inherited taste he began to collect and study the handiwork of the ancient native races of the Delaware river valley, and having made his scientific headquarters at the Peabody museum, Cambridge, Mass., was appointed a non-resident assistant at that institution, which office he held, 1876-89. On his removal in 1874 to the homestead farm of his family near Trenton, N.J., he entered systematically into biological studies which he had previously irregularly pursued. He devoted himself to accumulating what became the "Abbott Collection" of Eastern North American antiquities, numbering more than 20,000 specimens, composed principally of stone implements used by the prehistoric races, now at the Peabody museum and which was the outcome of fifteen years' work. He announced the discovery of Paleolithic man in America in 1876, and his claim was violently opposed by all the geologists in the country, but the view as originally set forth by Mr. Abbott became generally accepted by competent authorities, both in Europe and America. In 1889 he was appointed curator of the museum of American archæology of the University of Pennsylvania. As early as 1859 he contributed brief zoological sketches and then more elaborate essays to periodicals in England and the United States, and other articles purely literary, his magazine work covering more than one hundred titles from 1870 to 1895. He devoted himself wholly to literary work from 1872 and is the author of: "The Stone Age in New Jersey" (1876); "Primitive Industry or Illustrations of the Handwork in Stone, Bone and Clay of the Native Races of the Northern Atlantic Seaboard" (1881); "A Naturalist's Rambles About Home" (1884); "Upland and Meadow" (1886); "Wasteland Wanderings" (1887); "Days Out of Doors" (1889); "Outings at Odd Times" (1890); "Recent Rambles" (1893); "Travels in a Tree Top" (1894); "The Birds About Us" (1895); "A Colonial Wooing" (novel, 1895); "Bird Land Echoes" (1896); "Notes of the Night" (1896); "When the Century Was New" (1896); "The Freedom of the Fields" (1897); "The Hermit of Nottingham " (1897); "Clear Skies and Cloudy" (1898; "In Nature's Realm" (1900).