Eigenmann, Carl H.

Eigenmann, Carl H. (ī`gənmən), 1863–1927, American ichthyologist, b. Germany, grad. Indiana Univ., 1886. From 1891 he taught at Indiana Univ., founding and directing the biological station at Winona Lake. With his wife, Rosa Smith Eigenmann (1859–1947), he studied and published much on the fishes of South America. His greatest work was "The American Characinidae" (1917–29 in five parts in the Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology). He also studied degenerate evolution (in which characteristics that seem to be biologically regressive are inherited when they better enable the organism to survive its environment) in cave-dwelling vertebrates and wrote Cave Vertebrates of North America (1909).