Sidney Irving Smith

Sidney Irving Smith (February 18, 1843 – May 6, 1926) was an American zoologist, specializing in entomology and carcinology. He was elected in 1884 a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

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Quotes

... The Sprinkled Locust ...
The structure of the female appendages is beautifully adapted to a remarkable habit in the manner of depositing the eggs, which seems not to have been noticed before among Orthoptera. The eggs are deposited in old logs, in the undersides of boards, or in any soft wood lying among the grass which these insects inhabit. By the means of the anal appendages the female excavates in the wood a smooth round hole about an eighth of an inch in diameter. This hole is almost perpendicular at first but is turned rapidly off in the direction of the grain of the wood, and runs nearly parallel with and about three-eighths of an inch from the surface; the whole length of the hole being an inch or an inch and a fourth. A single hole noticed in the end of a log was straight. The eggs, which are about a fourth of an inch in length, quite slender and light brownish yellow, are placed in two rows, one on each side, and inclined so that, beginning at the end of the hole, each egg overlies the next in the same row by about half an inch. The aperture is closed by a little disk of a hard gummy substance.
- (1869). "On the Orthoptera of the State of Maine". Proceedings of the Portland Society of Natural History, Portland, Maine Volume I, Part II: 143–151. (quote from pp. 145–146)

Parapagurus pilosimantus Smith ...
... the Albatross dredgings have very greatly extended the bathymetrical range of this species. It had previously been taken in 250 to 640 fathoms. This increased range in depth is apparently accompanied by a change in the kind of carcinœcia inhabited. All the earlier specimens, over four hundred in number, were found in carcinœcia of Epizoanthus paguriphilus Verrill, while the deep-water specimens were either in a very different species of Epizoanthus, in naked gastropod shells, or in an actinian closely resembling, if not identical with, Urticina consors Verrill, which often serves for the carcinœcium of the next species.
Sympagurus rictus Smith.
- "Article XV. Report on the Decapod Crustacea of the Albatross Dredgings Off the East Coast of the United States in 1883". Report of the Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries for 1882, United States Fish Commission. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1884. pp. 345–426. (quote from p. 354; text at archive.org)

Although Professor Smith's systematic work on the freshwater and marine crustaceae entitles him to a position in the front rank of American systematic zoologists, his studies on the life histories of the crustaceae proved of more general interest. He was the first to interpret correctly the successive stages in the larval life of the America lobster (1872, 1873); and his descriptions of the early life of other crustaceans, particulary of Ocypoda (1873), Hippa (1877), Pinnixa (1880), and Panopeus (1883), have found a wide application in interpretation of the relationships of the various groups.
For several years prior to 1874 he assisted Professor Verrill in the preparation of the classic "Report on the Invertebrate Animals of Vineyard Sound"; an ecological study that had no parallel in America for more than forty years. Professor Smith prepared all the material relating to the crustaceae and revised other parts of this widely used book.
- Wesley Roswell Coe, (1932). "Sidney Irving Smith 1843-1926". Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America XIV: 5–16. (quote from p. 7; biographical memoir presented in 1929 at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences)