Thomas Staughton Savage (June 7, 1804 in
Cromwell, Connecticut – December 27, 1880 in
Rhinebeck, New York
Rhinebeck is a village in the town of Rhinebeck in Dutchess County, New York, United States. The population was 2,657 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Poughkeepsie– Newburgh– Middletown, NY Metropolitan Statistical Area as well ...
) was an American Protestant clergyman, missionary, physician, and
naturalist.
He attended
Yale College
Yale College is the undergraduate college of Yale University. Founded in 1701, it is the original school of the university. Although other Yale schools were founded as early as 1810, all of Yale was officially known as Yale College until 1887, ...
and
Yale Medical School
The Yale School of Medicine is the graduate medical school at Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was founded in 1810 as the Medical Institution of Yale College and formally opened in 1813.
The primary te ...
. His first marriage was to Susan A. Metcalfe September 28, 1838. He married his second wife, Maria Chapin, in 1842. It was after her death that he married Elizabeth Rutherford, granddaughter of the author
Eliza Fenwick, in 1844. He was the father of five children, Elizabeth Fenwick Savage (b. 1846), Alexander Duncan Savage (b. 1848), Thomas Rutherford Savage (b. 1852), William Rutherford Savage (b. 1854), Jesse Duncan Savage (b. 1858). He was the grandfather of the American artist Thomas Casilear Cole (1888-1976).
In 1836 Savage was sent as a missionary to
Liberia
Liberia (), officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to Liberia–Sierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to Guinea–Liberia border, its north, Ivory Coast to Ivory Coast� ...
. During his time in Africa he acquired the skull and bones from an unknown ape species, which he described in 1847 at the
Boston Society of Natural History
The Boston Society of Natural History (1830–1948) in Boston, Massachusetts, was an organization dedicated to the study and promotion of natural history. It published a scholarly journal and established a museum. In its first few decades, the s ...
with American
naturalist and
anatomist
Anatomy () is the branch of biology concerned with the study of the structure of organisms and their parts. Anatomy is a branch of natural science that deals with the structural organization of living things. It is an old science, having it ...
Jeffries Wyman[Savage TS, Wyman J. (1847)]
Notice of the external characters and habits of Troglodytes gorilla, a new species of orang from the Gaboon River, osteology of the same
Boston J Nat Hist 5:417–443. with the scientific name ''Troglodytes gorilla'', now known as the
western gorilla
The western gorilla (''Gorilla gorilla'') is a great ape found in Africa, one of two species of the hominid genus ''Gorilla''. Large and robust with males weighing around , the hair is significantly lighter in color than the eastern gorilla, '' ...
.
[Conniff R. Discovering gorilla. Evolutionary Anthropology, 18: 55-61. ]
References
External links
*
Episcopal Church History
*
1804 births
1880 deaths
American Protestant missionaries
American zoologists
Yale School of Medicine alumni
People from Cromwell, Connecticut
{{US-zoologist-stub