Samuel Tufts, Jr. (1817–1902), a Massachusetts shell collector and aquarium stocker

Abstract

This paper documents the life of Samuel Tufts, Jr. (1817–1902), a Massachusetts shell collector and aquarium stocker. Tufts spent most of his life as a shoemaker and proprietor of express and furniture moving businesses. During the 1850s, he lived in Swampscott and Lynn, Massachusetts, adjacent seacoast communities, and there collected shells and conducted an aquarium stocking business. He published a list of local shells and donated specimens to the Essex Institute of Salem, Massachusetts. Tufts was a friend of the marine zoologist William Stimpson. His procedures for shipping live marine specimens were described in Robert Carter's A summer cruise on the coast of New England, an account of an 1858 cruise by Carter, Stimpson and others. Tuft's natural history activities seem to have ended when he relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, around 1860. Tufts is the only American aquarium stocker of this era whose methods have been recorded. His observations were published locally but were conveyed to the wider natural history community through publications of more prominent naturalists including William Greene Binney, Augustus Addison Gould and William Stimpson.