FUNERAL RITES MARK DEATH OF BARBOUR, FAMOUS NATURALIST

Funeral services were held yesterday afternoon for Thomas Barbour '06, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Director of the University Museum and of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and internationally known naturalist, who died Tuesday of a cerebral hemorrhage. His age was 61.

"Appropriately described by gargantuan adjectives" in a New York Herald Tribune editorial yesterday, Professor Barbour "was physically huge and his frame was matched by tremendous energy and zest for life, a great heart, a mind of extraordinary depth and penetration, and a brilliant and undeniably pungent tongue."

Professor Barbour, a student primarily of reptiles and amphibians and their geographical distribution, had interests also in far wider fields. His triad of well-known books, "A Naturalist at Large," "That Vanishing Eden," and "A Naturalist in Cuba," the latter concluded in 1945, contain little of the dry matter of zoology, though omitting nothing that a good naturalist could gather. His recent "Naturalist in Cuba," selections from which were printed in the Atlantic Monthly, discussed not only the animal, insect, and plant life of the region, but its geology, history, sociology, its people and their food as well.

Professor Barbour's vacations in Florida began his career as a naturalist. His grandmother took him to the Bahamas when he was 14, and it was there that he began his collection of snakes and toads. A year later, he noticed some dried toads mislabeled in the Harvard Museum and told the director about it. But the director only thought him presumptuous and Professor Barbour had to wait until 18 years later, when he himself became director of the museum, to correct the labels.