The family had an estate near Sheffield, Massachusetts and a town house on Eleventh Avenue near the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
[1] A precocious boy, Curtiss developed an early interest in natural history, encouraged by his mother and his well traveled maternal grandmother who as well as having studied medicine was a convert to Islam.
in so far as it applies to beasts, birds, reptiles, whales, fresh and salt water fish and shellfish, worms, insects and pests.
He made detailed descriptions of these, including the local name in the Tahitian language as well as putting forward new binomials for most of the animals he observed.
A review of his book in Science by Leonard Peter Schultz in 1940 mused that Curtiss was taking us back in time to Linnaeus’s era.
One of the authors of the Zoological Review chose to ignore Curtiss’s binomials as he took the view that they did not meet the then current nomenclatural rules.
[1] Curtiss and his family returned to the United States in 1939, settling near Akron, New York where his intention was to write a larger volume on Tahiti’s zoology.
It was while Curtiss was in Haiti that he started to observe and collect snakes and lizards, forwarding specimens to Doris Cochran at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
Here he retained his interest in natural history and was involved in the collection of freshwater fishes for the Humboldt Museum in Berlin, the specimens being credited to his adopted name.