Coues, Elliott

Coues, Elliott kouz [key], 1842–99, American ornithologist, b. Portsmouth, N.H., grad. Columbian College, later Columbian Univ. and now George Washington Univ. (B.A., 1861; M.D., 1863; Ph.D., 1869). He served as an army surgeon in the Civil War and as naturalist on government surveys and taught (1877–87) at Columbian Univ. He was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research and a leader in the theosophist movement. He wrote Key to North American Birds (1872), Birds of the Northwest (1847), and Fur-bearing Animals (1877); he edited the journals of Lewis and Clark (1893), Zebulon M. Pike (1895), and Alexander Henry and David Thompson (1897).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

See more Encyclopedia articles on: Zoology: Biographies