Dr. Moore was a professor of Zoology at the University of Pennsylvania. His involvement with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia began as a young man. Dr. Moore wrote an amusing account about how he came to be associated with the Academy. Upon entering the Central High School in Philadelphia ". . .(which was really a Junior College granting the A.B. degree), Dr. Jacob Holt, Prof. of Natural History and Physiology, introduced me to Dr. [Edward James] Nolan, the Secretary and Librarian [of the Academy], and I was given the privilege of using the library and a free card of admission to the museum. From that time I attended the Tuesday evening meetings of the Academy (as an invited visitor). These meetings were held at the head of the long reading room of the Library. Here was a raised platform and a well-lighted counter at its front. Behind this were three ornate chancellor chairs, the largest one in the center occupied by President Leidy and the smaller but similar ones on each side by the General Secretary Nolan and Corresponding Secretary [Edward Drinker] Cope. We boys used to designate the three as the Father, the Son and the Holy Terror."

At the Academy Dr. Moore served several positions there throughout his lifetime, Assistant Curator, Corresponding Secretary, Trustee, Library Committee, Publications Committee, the Council, Research Fellow and much more. Dr. Moore is best known in his lifetime for being the world authority on Leeches! That’s right, Leeches!

I had never really thought much, or anything for that matter, about leeches. But I found myself, the night before I began work on the collection, reading about Leeches. They are quite amazing creatures. I learned that there are 650 species of Leech. Later I discovered that Dr. Moore had named 6 genera, 229 species, 5 subspecies and 4 varieties of polychaetous annelids (the classification that includes ragworms, earthworms and leeches).

Initially, Dr. Moore’s papers were estimated by the PACSCL survey as being approximately 15.5 linear feet, however, upon inspection during the first day it actually measured 18 linear feet pre-processing. At post-processing the collection measured 23 linear feet! This was my first experience with the collection growing upon processing.

The collection dated from 1847 to 1963 and essentially had no original order. Only one linear foot had an order, it was of correspondence and was arranged alphabetically. However, it did not comprehensively include all of the correspondence in the collection. But this was among the least of my worries. Out of the 18 pre-processing linear footage, 9 contained materials lying stacked on top of each other mostly in envelopes, and sometimes in boxes within boxes. I couldn’t process the contents with the materials stacked and inside old manila envelopes. Keeping the original order of the materials, in case there was one, I took out the bundle of papers from the envelope and placed both the contents and the envelope in an acid free folder, vertically in an acid free box. After all the materials were transferred I could discern what the contents were and if there was an original order. . . there was not.

One bundle of papers which was wrapped in an old brown paper bag, was in German and French, and predated Dr. Moore’s birth by ten to twenty years. The papers were folded and in envelopes, and some were tied up with string. Upon closer inspection I could make out a few key words, "amphibian," "fish," "skeleton," "Wien" (German for Vienna), and the repetitive appearance of the name “Professor J. Hyrth” sometimes spelled, “Hirth”. Some documents I could tell were financial in nature and others I could tell were official transportation documents. Many were letters to Professor Hyrth. I wondered why Dr. Moore would have these papers? What exactly were they? How did Dr. Moore get them? And who was Professor Hyrth? Tucked inside papers, I came across a letter to Dr. Moore stating his inheritance of papers and some other materials from Dr. Cope, which was a name I recognized. Edward Drinker Cope, was a scientist at the Academy as well as the Corresponding Secretary. While this still didn’t answer all of my questions, it did provide me with the lead I needed to piece it all together. A quick search revealed that what I had thought was the letter "h" at the end of "Hyrth" was actually an "l", Hyrtl. I learned that Professor Joseph Hyrtl was a renowned Austrian Anatomist who collected fish skeletons, which were purchased by Dr. Cope for a paper he wrote in 1871. Upon Cope’s death in 1898 those papers were bequeathed to Dr. Moore, and the mystery of the foreign language documents about fish skeletons was solved!

Another interesting set of papers were correspondence about writing a biography on Joseph Leidy, who Dr. Moore first met when he was eleven and attended Leidy’s lectures on Zoology at the Wagner Free Institute of Science. The correspondence shows that completing Leidy’s biography was proving a difficult task, as every person who picked up the task died before completion.

Most of Dr. Moore’s papers were sketches and notes about various annelid specimens. He would write on the tiniest scraps of paper and on the back of anything, even his own work. There was one manuscript that had a draft of a paper on one side and a completely different paper drafted on the other side! The collection included lantern slides and 16mm film reels from his expedition to India in 1930-1931. There were also lots of photographs of leeches.

If you can’t tell, I absolutely loved this collection. It was wonderful to work on it. Examining the collection post-processing, there is a marked difference in access and usefulness, however, with minimal processing I was not able to do everything that I would have liked to do. For example, the many photographs of leech specimens are all well labeled with dates and species names. Time did not permit me to label each photographic envelope, nor put the photographs into an order (the photographs are only processed to the series level). This collection deserves further processing.