James Ellsworth De Kay was an American naturalist, though born in Portugal and educated in Edinburgh. (He received his M.D. in 1819.) De Kay became actively associated with the New York Lyceum of Natural History (later called the New York Academy of Sciences), serving as a librarian and first editor of its Annals. He studies Asiatic cholera in Turkey from 1831 to 1832. Then, De Kay returned to the States to join the New York state natural history survey as zoologist, reporting the wrok of his division in the monumental Zoology of New York in five volumes, 1842-44. Bibliography the Columbia Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. , 1950