Orcutt was the eldest of five children of Herman Chandler Orcutt and Eliza Eastin Gray Orcutt. In 1879, the Orcutt family moved to
San Diego, where his father, a horticulturalist, opened a nursery near the ruins of the
San Diego Mission de Alcalá. Orcutt worked with his father, collecting plant specimens in the San Diego area and
Baja California. In 1884 he began
The West American Scientist, which he irregularly published until 1919. He began to be referred to as witty and as a hopeless eccentric. The year 1892 proved significant for him as his father died and he married a doctor from New York named
Olive Lucy Eddy. Eddy was among the first women to earn a Doctor of Medicine degree at the
University of Michigan’s Homœopathic Medical College at Ann Arbor, in 1882. Her medical practice did much to support them, and with her sister Clara she published a magazine titled
Out of Doors For Women. The couple had four children. At first Orcutt primarily collected plant specimens, but his interest began to shift from botany to conchology (
Eugene Coan identified Charles Orcutt as a “pioneer malacologist”). He is credited with discovering at least three new Mollusca:
Black abalone subspecies
Haliotis cracherodii bonita and
Haliotis cracherodii rosea, and
Haliotis corrugata subspecies
diegoensis. A new genus he found was named after him:
Coralliochama orcutti. He maintained a residence in Jamaica in 1927 and in 1929 the
Smithsonian Institution funded him for work in Haiti. After seven months of work there, he was exhausted and ill and stayed with an American embassy official in
Jérémie until he was hospitalized. Charles Russell Orcutt died of
malaria on the morning of 25 August 1929. He is buried in
Port-au-Prince. Orcutt is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of lizard,
Sceloporus orcutti. ==References==