The NSS Bulletin - ISSN 1090-6924
Volume 46 Number 1: 10-14 - April 1984
A publication of the National Speleological Society

F.W. Putnam's Scientific Studies at Mammoth Cave (1871-1881)
Ralph W. Dexter

Abstract

F.W. Putnam studied Mammoth Cave in Kentucky first as an ichthyologist, with special attention to the blind fishes, but later primarily as an archaeologist as his career shifted from one field to the other. His visits to Mammoth Cave mark the transition from zoologist at the Peabody Academy of Science in Salem, Massachusetts, to Curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. He found a fish (Chologaster agassizi) in Mannoth Cave very similar to one he had recently desribed as new from underground streams in Tennessee and determined that the physical character and culture of human inhabitants were similar in all of the caves that he examined in that area.

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