SIGNED. The Wilder Quarter-Century Book. A Collection of Original Papers Dedicated to Professor Burt Green Wilder at the close of his twenty-fifth year of service in Cornell University (1868-1893) by some of his former students

Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing Co., 1893. First edition.

SIGNED--FIRST AMERICAN FESTSCHRIFT HONORS HARVARD ANATOMIST BG WILDER--COLLEAGUE OF LOUIS AGASSIZ AND ASA GRAY.

16x25.5 cm red cloth boards, covers blindstamped, spine gilt, corners bumped, vg, no dj. Ex-lib Harvard Medical School [withdrawn]. Frontispiece (portrait of Wilder on tissue paper, glued along top and bottom edges to blank leaf), vi, 493 pp; illus. Original cloth. Spine slightly discolored where label removed. Institutional bookplate on front pastedown (stamped "withdrawn"). Corners of covers slightly worn. Tear in one edge of tissue-paper frontispiece. Very Good. First Edition.

SIGNED IN PENCIL BY BURT WILDER ON TISSUE-PAPER FRONTISPIECE.

Includes a bibliography of Burt Wilder's publications. Contributors to this festschrift for Burt Wilder include: David Starr Jordan; Anna Botsford Comstock; John Henry Comstock; Eugene Rollin Corson; Leland O. Howard; Theobald Smith; William Christopher Krauss; Susanna Phelps Gage; Hermann Michael Biggs; John Casper Branner; Veranus Alva Moore; Grant Sherman Hopkins; Pierre Augustine Fish; William Russell Dudley; Simon Henry Gage; Milton Josiah Roberts.

WIlder was a close friend of John Henry Comstock, who wrote in Wilder's obituary in Science May 22, 1925: "As an evidence of the high regard in which Dr. Wilder was held by his former pupils, some of them upon his completion of a quarter of a century of service in the university prepared and published a volume of original contributions to science, "as a testimonial of their appreciation of his unselfish devotion to the university and in grateful remembrance of the inspiration of his teaching and example." This volume was entitled "The Wilder Quarter-Century Book" and included original contributions to science from fifteen of his former pupils. This, so far as is known to the writer, was the first American adoption of the German plan of honoring a beloved professor by the publication of a Festschrift."

BURT GREEN WILDER (1841 - 1925) was an American comparative anatomist. He graduated from Harvard (Lawrence Scientific School), 1862; medical department, 1866). During part of the Civil War he served as surgeon of the Fifty-fifth (Negro) Massachusetts Infantry. From 1867 to his retirement in 1910 he was professor of neurology and vertebrate zoölogy at Cornell. In 1885 he was president of the American Neurological Association and in 1898 of the Association of American Anatomists. While at Cornell, WIlder began what would become the Wilder Brain Collection. His own brain was removed from his corpse and added to the collection. Wilder corresponded with Prof. Louis Agassiz, Asa Gray, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Jeffries Wyman, with whom he worked at Harvard University as an assistant after receiving his M.D. degree there in 1866. He was a professor of anatomy, physiology, comparative neurology and vertebrate zoology at Cornell from 1867-1910, where he devoted special attention to human and animal brain mechanism experiments, and the nervous system. At the time of his retirement he had gathered between 1,600 and 2,000 brain specimens with completed data. (Currently, 70 of these specimens survive.)