Ellis Yochelson
Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Washington

Except for those who work on trilobites, Charles Walcott is an obscure figure. Recently, he has ben brought into greater prominence in Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life; being viewed as something of a conservative in classification. Perhaps, but then again, perhaps not. The Burgess Shale is a complex topic, and I would prefer to set that aside for the moment and slip back a few years in an attempt to wave the flag for Mr. Walcott.

Because the International Rules of Zoological Nomenclature do not apply above the family level, it is sometimes hard to trace the history of higher categories. Ideas are commonly more diffuse than at lower levels of classification, and it is not always possible to understand precisely what an author meant in terms of systematics. The Trilobite Treatise credits Trilobita to Walch (1771) as he was the first to describe a trilobite.

Accepting that the Arthropoda constitutes a phylum of living and fossil organisms characterized by jointed limbs, who first clearly indicated that the trilobites should be ranked as a class-level taxon within this phylum? In my view, it was Charles Doolittle Walcott who first stated that the trilobites constituted a class distinct from the crustaceans, and that the merostomes and limulids constituted another class. This was published in his "Notes on some appendages of the Trilobites (Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, vol.9 and later reprinted in volume 1 of Geological Magazine). Not only do I think that this was the first separation of the trilobites from the crustaceans, it may have been the first use of a class name which was based exclusively on extinct organisms. What is of interest is that the date of publication is 1894 -- fifteen years before the first bizarre Burgess Shale fossil was collected by Walcott.

Although it is difficult for me to judge what is advanced and what is conservative in systematic classification, moving the trilobites to class rank strikes me as an advanced idea. Certainly, it was far ahead of the textbooks in zoology and geology of the 1880s. Class Trilobita is a concept that has withstood the test of time.

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Franco Rasetti: Physicist and Paleontologist

Rolf Ludvigsen
Denman Institute for Research on Trilobites

Franco Rasetti’s contribution to taxonomy of Cambrian trilobites of North America is well known to specialists; his contribution to physics, much less so. During the 1920s and ‘30s, Rasetti worked in the infant field of nuclear physics with Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segre at the University of Rome. In 1936, he published what was probably the first textbook in the field -- Elements of Nuclear Physics.

Just before the outbreak of the war, Professor C. Ouellet of Laval University was sent to Italy to make covert contacts with Rasetti and to try to recruit him for this Quebec university. Ouellet remembers that the operation was straight out of a spy novel (supplement to Quebec Science, February, 1988 issue):

"J’ai fait croire que j’allais visiter une tante religieuse. Nous avons pris les
arrangements au cours de promenades dans les rue de Rome, loin des
oreilles indiscretes"

Rasetti arrived at Laval in 1939 where he quickly went to work to establish a Department of Physics. Larkin Kerwin, who was Rasetti’s last graduate student at Laval and who, up until last year, was President of the National Research Council of Canada, recalls (letter, March 11, 1988):

"Rasetti had a strong and continuing influence on Canadian physics. He founded
the Laval department pretty much on a shoestring. He was an experimentalist
and developed a program that was heavy on laboratory work. He did not buy
things - he made them, and for a generation most of the equipment was made in
the department. He was reputed by the Italians to have as fine a brain as Fermi,
and I can well believe it. He did a lot of research himself and he launched the
first graduate students in fields which have flourished and are still strong at Laval.
His standards and integrity are still by-words."

Why didn’t Rasetti get involved with the development of the atomic bomb under the war-time Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago along with a number of his Italian physicist colleagues? Kerwin explains:

"Rasetti did not go to the USA because he knew he would get involved with
war work. He was not a pacifist in the usual sense of the work. He simply
considered war to be stupid, and did not wish to be involved with stupid things.
There appears to have been little of the moral or the political aspects to the
question. It was intellectual, and Rasetti was purely an intellectual person."

While he was at Laval, Rasetti began to collect, prepare and photograph trilobites from Cambrian and Ordovician limestone boulders in the Levis Formation of Quebec. Kerwin remembers that Rasetti’s graduate students were often pressed into service -- work with fossils was considered useful to form a well-rounded personality. Rasetti’s trilobite work expanded to other parts of North America after he moved to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1947. His last paleontologic paper, on trilobites from Sardinia (1972), was published in Italy after he had retired from Johns Hopkins.

Rasetti’s early work with Fermi in Italy is treated in many books and articles (Fermi, 1954; Holton, 1974; Libby, 1979), but Nason (1966) is the only article I have been able to locate that also considers his paleontologic work.

Fermi, Laura. 1954. Atoms in the Family. University of Chicago Press.
Holton, G. 1974. Fermi’s group and the recapture of Italy’s place in physics. Minerva,
vol. 12, p. 158-198.
Libby, L.M. 1979. The Uranium People. Crane Russak, New York.
Nason, T. 1966. A man for all sciences. Johns Hopkins Magazine, January issue,
p. 12-17, 25-27.

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An Underground Trilobite

During their heyday in the late 1960s and ‘70s, underground comics gave expression to a youth counterculture that rejected virtually everything considered important by established society. These comics dealt largely with sex and with drugs; they were frequently scatological and almost always obscene. Police, politicians, professors, parents and other figures of authority were always held in great comptempt. Middle class values were rejected. A formidable array of bizarre beings were strewn across their pages; some human, others less than animate. Not even the objects of our sober paleontologic scholarship were safe from the rude pen of the underground artist. Here is the opening panel of Atrillo Trilobite drawn by Robert Williams in a 1970 edition of Coochy Cooty Comics published, naturally, in Berkeley, California.