Edward S. Morse

Edward Sylvester Morse ( born June 18, 1838 in Portland ( Maine), † December 20, 1925 in Salem ( Massachusetts)) was an American malacologist, archaeologist and expert on Japanese ceramics.

Morse was the one calling the Congregationalists. He was at school with little success and was relegated regularly, but it had success as a snail and mussel collectors and even as a teenager discovered two new species. His main job was working as a draftsman. Because of his reputation as a collector and his drawing skills, he became the assistant of Louis Agassiz at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. He was in charge there, the collection of molluscs and brachiopods. In 1863, he founded with other Agassiz students the journal The American journalist and was one of the editors. In 1864 he published a book on the terrestrial mollusks of Maine and in 1870 one on brachiopods, he was one of the worms. From 1871 he was professor of comparative anatomy and zoology at Bowdoin College, and from 1874 Lecturer at Harvard.

In 1877 he visited Japan to collect brachiopods for the first time. He stayed for three years after he was offered a professorship of zoology at the Imperial University in Tokyo. This was due to the opening of Japan in the Meiji period. He collected and studied Japanese ceramics ( goes to him after the term Jōmon - time) and he recognized the importance of middens for the Japanese archeology. As a zoologist, he founded a laboratory for marine biology in Enoshima. In 1885 he published a book about Japanese living culture (Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, New York: Harper ). He returned several times in the 1880s to Japan and also visited Southeast Asia and Europe.

In 1890 he was curator of ceramics at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and 1880 to 1914 he was also director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Salem. In 1914 he became head of the Museum of Fine Arts, and in 1915 the Peabody Museum.

As a friend of the astronomer Percival Lowell, he visited several times his observatory in Flagstaff and in 1906 published a book Mars and Its Mysteries to Lowell to defend theses of life on Mars.

In 1876 he became a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1883 he became Vice President and 1886-1998 President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1898 he was awarded the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun 3rd class and in 1922 the Order of the Sacred Treasure 2nd Class.

He was married in 1863 and had two children.

His collection of Japanese ceramics in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Japanese commodities at the Peabody Museum. A large number of his books he donated to the University of Tokyo - they burned there in the great earthquake of 1923.