Frederic Putnam was born in Salem, Massachusetts on April 16, 1839. While he was young and still at home, Putnam studied the birds in his area and by the time he was 16, had published a list of the birds in his home county. That same year, he accepted a position as Curator of Ornithology in the Essex Institute. When Putnam was 17 years of age, he entered Harvard University and studied zoology under Louis Agassiz.
While in college, his interests became varied and he soon switched from ornithology to ichthyology but never really settled in any one field. He was an author, a naturalist and a pioneer excavator of Indian sites. Putnam held a variety of positions in his lifetime starting as early as 1864 with Curator of Vetebrates for the Essex Institute. He was also Director of the Museum in Essex from 1869 to 1873, Curator of Ichthyology at the Boston Society of Natural History from 1859 to 1868 and Superintendant of the Museum of the East Indian Marine Society from 1867 to 1869.
In 1873, Professor Putnam was elected Permanent Secretary for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. After having held the position for twenty-five years, he was offered the presidency of the Association. He was hired as Curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology, the first real institute devoted to that science, and after eleven years, he also became a professor with the Peabody Museum. His career ended with the Chicago Fair as Chief of the Department of Ethnology in the World's Columbian Exposition between 1891 and 1894. Frederic Putnam was an amazing man who wrote more that four hundred publications in total and was awarded too many honors to list.
Former Link, http://www.biography.com/cgi-bin/biomain.cgi, (2006)
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