Chapman Grant

Chapman Grant (born March 27, 1887 in Salem Center, New York, died January 5, 1983 in Escondido, California) was an American herpetologist, historian, and publisher. He was the last living grandson of United States president Ulysses S. Grant. He was married and had two children, one of whom survived him.

Biography

Chapman Grant was the son of Jesse Root Grant, the youngest son of the 18th President of the United States Ulysses S. Grant. In 1892 he moved to San Diego with his parents. As a child, he spent time at the California Academy of Sciences, where he developed his interest in science. He graduated from Williams College in 1910. He became the assistant curator of entomology at the Children's Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in September 1913. In November 1913, left the museum for a military career beginning on the Mexican border. He was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the 14th U.S. Cavalry. He married Mabel Lillian Pennebacker in December 1913. He continued his scientific studies while in the Army. When he was assigned as commandant of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps at the University of Wichita in the 1930s, he wrote scientific papers on herpetology and was curator at the Arkansas Valley Museum and Historical Society. He retired with a rank of Major.

In the 1930s and 1950s several expeditions for the San Diego Museum of Natural History and the University of Illinois Museum of Natural History led him to the study of the Caribbean herpetofauna where he discovered and described fifteen new species, including Grant's Blindsnake, Blue Iguana, Cotton Ginner Gecko, Gaige's Dwarf Gecko, Klauber's Dwarf Gecko, Nichols' Dwarf Gecko, Roosevelt's Dwarf Gecko, Townsend's Dwarf Gecko, Cook's Anole, Culebra Island Giant Anole, Cochran's Croaking Gecko, Web-footed Coqui, Cook's Robber Frog and the Whistling Coqui.

In 1932 he established the magazine Herpetologica, the quarterly journal of the Herpetologists' League, an association of several notable herpetologists in the USA, which he co-founded in 1936. He was also the publisher of a second magazine - Scientists Forum.

In 1982 the Major Chapman Grant Hall of Ecology in the Museum of Natural History in San Diego was named in honour of him. In 1983 he died in a nursing home. He left one son - Ulysses S. Grant V (b. 20 September 1920).

Works

• Secondary sexual differences and notes on the mud turtle Kinosternon subrubrum in northern Indiana. American Midland Naturalist (1935) 16(5) pp. 798-800.

• Natrix sipedon sipedon in central Indiana, its individual and sexual variation. American Midland Naturalist (1935) 16(6) pp. 921-931.

• Herpetological notes from central Kansas. American Midland Naturalist (1937) 18(3) pp. 370-372.

• The Herpetology of Jamaica (with W. Gardner Lynn), (1940) Bull. Inst. Jamaica Sci. Ser. 1: 1-148.

• Differentiation of the two southwestern tortoises (genus Gopherus), with notes on their habits. Trans. San Diego Nat. Hist. Soc. (1960) 12(27) pp. 441-448.

External links

• Chapman Grant Dead at 95; Grandson of Ulysses S. Grant - Obituary in the New York Times (engl.)

References

• Obituary, Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1983, p. C4.