Чарльз Фредерик Хартт: Бразилия геологы және палеонтологы

Canadian American geologist, paleontologist and naturalist

Charles Frederick Hartt (23 August 1840 in Fredericton, New Brunswick – 18 March 1878) was a Canadian American geologist, paleontologist and naturalist who specialized in the geology of Brazil.

Hartt graduated from Acadia College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, in 1860, and by his graduation he had made extensive geological explorations in Nova Scotia. In 1860, he accompanied his father, Jarvis William Hartt, to Saint John, New Brunswick, where they established a high school for young women in which Charles Frederick taught for a year. Hartt also studied the geology of New Brunswick, and devoted special attention to the Devonian shales, in which he discovered an abundance of land plants and insects. In 1865 he accompanied Agassiz to Brazil in the Thayer Expedition. Agassiz was mainly concerned with collecting fish on the expedition through the Amazonian basin. so the complete natural history of the Amazonian basin during the LGM is developing a more complex narrative in which Hartt's field work can be expounded. Agassiz and Hartt were also searching in 1865 for evidence that could prove or disprove the 1859 Darwinian evolutionary theory, in contrast to the multiple creation theory it proposed to replace. From a scientific point of view, Darwinism could potentially resolve inconsistencies in the multiple creation narrative, just as multiple creation theory was an attempt to resolve inconsistencies in the single creation theory. The inconsistencies were facts that could not be compellingly explained by each theory. Evolutionary theory was not immediately accepted because of a lack of fossil evidence (an issue resolved by discovery of more and more fossil "missing links") and its inability to explain the distribution of species better than multiple creation theory (an issue resolved in the 1960s by plate tectonics). There were a few inconsistencies such as the Lamarckian idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics that Darwin had accepted and later expanded upon in his writings on heredity. Hartt died in Rio de Janeiro on 18 March 1878, after contracting yellow fever, at the age of 38. Agassiz died earlier, in 1873, before major discoveries could provide substantial fossil evidence and before the neo Darwinists improved Darwinism by asserting the Weismann barrier in 1893. Hartt had gathered useful specimens in Brazil that could be explained by the 20th century Darwinian narrative of accelerated evolution, which hypothesized that Amazonian butterflies survived in isolated refuges during ice ages. But in the 21st century the refuge mechanism has been diminished as a possible explanation by research that determined sufficient rainfall maintained a more complete ecosystem, which increases the likelihood of a more complex mosaic mechanism to explain the variations in Hartt's specimens. The ancient pollen data in the Bolivian rainforest of the Amazonian basin indicates that it was savannah during the LGM. One of Hartt's students, the American geologist Orville Adalbert Derby (1851–1915), succeeded him at the National Museum, after having accompanied him in two of the Morgan Expeditions (1870 and 1871) and having worked with him at the Imperial Commission.

The Armoured Catfish genus Harttia is named after him.