Cassin, John

John Cassin was a Pennsylvania Quaker who served as the curator for the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. He was also a gifted taxonomist who succeeded in illustrating and describing 198 birds that were not included in either publication of his great predecessors Audubon and Wilson. Cassin’s great achievement was his completion of one volume of illustrations of his tremendous project The Birds of California, Texas, Oregon, British and Russian America (1853-56). After his death, Brown University purchased his collection of over 4,300 birds for the university’s museum of natural history.