AARON LOUIS TREADWELL
1866 - 1947
In Professor Emeritus Aaron Louis Treadwell Vassar
College honors an eminent zoologist and a beloved
teacher and friend.
Mr. Treadwell was a member of the second generation
of American zoologists that succeeded Agassiz. His
brilliant research on the embryology of the worm
Podarke started him on the way to becoming the world's
authority on the polychaete annelids. Investigators
sent him their specimens from many parts of the globe
for study and identification. For more than two
decades the American Museum of Natural History sub-
mitted for his description and classification material
collected on its expeditions. For the Carnegie In-
stitution he carried his studies to the Caribbean and
the Gulf of Mexico, to Samoa and Fiji. He worked at
the Marine Biological Laboratory and at the Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory. The honorary degree of doctor of
science, which Wesleyan University conferred upon him
in 1938, stood for a solid contribution to scientific
knowledge.
For thirty-seven years, from 1900 until his retirement
in 1937, Mr. Treadwell was Giraud Professor of Biology,
later Zoology, at Vassar. For the same period he was
curator of Vassar's Museum of Natural History. He be-
longed to the company of great teachers who built the
traditions of our college. President MacCracken wrote:
"To Professor Treadwell more than to any other person
in the field of science is due the sound position taken
by the departments of science at Vassar College." With
the soundness went initiative. Mr. Treadwell intro-
duced the study of evolution before college adminis-
trators liked to acknowledge its place in the curriculum.
He and Miss Washburn taught their joint course in Animal
Behavior before the faculty had deliberated on Related
Studies. He sent his students out, with nets and bot-
tles, to their field work on the campus. His depart-
ment offered the first course in anthropology on the
campus. His own teaching was witty and winning: it
beguiled a long line of students into taking a scien-
tific attitude toward annelids and other living creatures.
He helped a good number of them to careers in his own
prefession. Because Vassar's zoologist was also a Con-
necticut farmer he could tell alumnae how to make butter
and when to dig parsnips.
16
AARON LOUIS TREADWELL (continued)
For some years after his retirement Mr. Treadwell spent
part of each winter near the campus. He was as sociable
as ever. He continued to gladden our eyes with his
debonair elegance, to enliven our minds with his talk,
to satisfy our hearts with the goodness beneath his
urbanity.
He always enjoyed going back to the Connecticut farm,
near the place of his birth and his boyhood, where he
had first known his wife. There they had spent many
summers with their children, and it was there that he
died, on July 17, l947, in the eighty-first year of his
life.
Josephine M. Gleason
Barbara Swain
Rudolf T. Kempton
XII - 184