Gabb, William More

Gabb, William More

(b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 20 January 1839; d. Philadelphia, 30 May 1878)

geology.

A native of the leading American scientific city of the time, Gabb became acquainted early with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. His father, Joseph Gabb, was a salesman and may have died when the boy was fourteen, at which time his mother, known only as J. H. More Gabb, became a milliner. Gabb did well at Central High School in Philadelphia, where Martin Hans Boyé taught natural science. The boy was already collecting minerals and shells. He became a good friend of George H. Horn, later a paleontologist and entomologist, and George W. Tryon, Jr., later a conchologist.

In 1857 Gabb chose geology as his field and sought aid from the noted James Hall, whose pupil and assistant he became. In 1860 he spent some time at the Philadelphia Academy and then briefly joined the enthusiastic scientific group around Spencer F. Baird at the Smithsonian Institution. Recommended as a foremost authority on Cretaceous fossils, Gabb in 1862 joined the California State Geological Survey under Josiah Dwight Whitney. For six years he traveled throughout much of California and beyond, from Vancouver Island to the tip of Baja California. From 1869 to 1872 he conducted a topographical and geologic survey of Santo Domingo for its government and, from 1873 to 1876, a similar survey in Costa Rica. Tuberculosis ended his career.

Gabb was elected a member and curator of paleontology of the California Academy of Sciences in 1862 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1876.

A very competent field man, Gabb was a diligent worker and was early recognized as the authority on New World invertebrate Cretaceous fossils, of which he described many. As part of the California survey, he wrote monographs on the state’s Upper Mesozoic and Tertiary rocks. Although his later paleontological work was unfinished, he contributed much on the geography of Baja California, Santo Domingo, and Costa Rica. On his extensive journeys he collected many geologic, ethnologic, entomological, and other natural history specimens for the Smithsonian Institution and other museums.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Gabb’s publications, listed in Dall’s memoir (cited below), include a number of taxonomic papers and several valuable areal reports: “Description of the Triassic Fossils of California and the Adjacent Territories.” in Geological Survey of California, Paleontology, I (Philadelphia, 1864), 17–35; “Description of the Cretaceous Fossils,” ibid., 55–243; “Cretaceous and Tertiary Fossils.” ibid., II (1869); and also “On the Topography and Geology of Santo Domingo,” in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 15 (1872), 49–260. Several papers on the geology of Costa Rica appeared in American Journal of Science (1874, 1875). “Notes on the Geology of Lower California,” in Geological Survey of California, II (Philadelphia, 1882), app. 137–148, was published after Gabb’s death. George W. Tryon, Jr., completed several of Gabb’s taxonomic papers after Gabb died.

II. Secondary Literature. Gabb’s early life is incompletely known. The available material and a summary of his professional life was presented by William H. Dall, in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 6 (1909), 347–361. E. O. Essig’s History of Entomology (New York, 1965), p. 638, refers briefly to Gabb’s insect collecting.

Elizabeth Noble Shor