“Wilder’s professional achievements and his contributions to the Smith College curriculum were numerous. In his second year at Smith, Wilder founded the school’s Zoology Department. Two years later he added fieldwork to the curriculum, a rare notion at that time. By the early 1900s, his classes, especially those in evolution and anthropology, were overenrolled by both majors and non-majors. He was an active researcher and writer, publishing either an article or a book nearly every year of his professional life. He produced five major books: History of the Human Body, Personal Identification, A Laboratory Manual of Anthropometry, Allan’s Prehistoric Past, and The Pedigree of the Human Race. His primary areas of research were amphibian studies, primate and human identification using palm and sole prints, teratology (the study of genetic malformations) among human twins, comparative anatomy, and physical anthropology, including the excavations of skeletal remains of indigenous Indian races of Massachusetts. Notable achievements included the discovery of a species of salamanders without lungs or gills, and the development of a system for reconstructing a lifelike human face solely from the measurements taken from a deceased individual’s skull.”1
