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Concept
Henry Augustus Pilsbry
Summary
Henry Augustus Pilsbry (7 December 1862 – 26 October 1957) was an American biologist, malacologist and carcinologist, among other areas of study. He was a dominant presence in many fields of invertebrate taxonomy for the better part of a century. For much of his career, his authority with respect to the classification of certain substantial groups of organisms was unchallenged: barnacles, chitons, North American terrestrial mollusks, and others.
Pilsbry (frequently misspelled Pilsbury) spent his childhood and youth in Iowa. He was called "Harry" Pilsbry then, and developed an early fascination with the limited variety of mollusks he was able to find. He attended the University of Iowa, and received the Bachelor of Science degree there in 1882, but did not immediately find employment in his field of interest. Instead, Henry Pilsbry worked for publishing firms and newspapers for the next several years, but devoted most of his spare time to the study of mollusks.
In 1887, he found employment in New York City as a proofreader, but soon met George Washington Tryon, the resident expert on mollusks at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and architect and author of the ongoing multi-volume Manual of Concology. This meeting led, within a few months, to Tryon's hiring Pilsbry as an assistant. He was, no doubt, impressed by the young man's talents as a proofreader, considerable expertise in technical illustration, and especially by his undeniable enthusiasm for the study of mollusks and substantial knowledge of the subject.
Less than three months after Pilsbry began his new job, George Tryon died and his new assistant, only 25 years old, perhaps to the surprise of some, inherited the titles of "Conservator of the Conchology Section" and "Editor" of the Manual of Conchology.
Pilsbry soon proved capable of prodigious efforts, and his scientific output was remarkable. During the next five years he produced hundreds of detailed pages of the Manual of Conchology, preparing many of the plates himself, and founded The Nautilus, an influential journal of malacology which has survived into the 21st century.
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