Emerson and Holmes among its members; the Examiner's Club composed of intellectual and clerical men who met to discuss religious and scientific topics; The Thursday Club, a social and intellectual organization; and the Bound Table Club, which was for years presided over by Colonel Thomas W. Higginson and met for the discussion of sociological, educational and political subjects. Another organization of intellectual men was known simply as "The Club" and met for discussions of many interesting topics at the houses of the various members, all of whom were Cambridge men, such as "William James, Horace and Samuel Scudder, Putnam, Trowbridge, Oilman, Dr. Hildreth, Thomdike and Justin Winsor.
Hyatt was keenly appreciative of the natural beauty of the primeval American landscape which man had done so much to desecrate, and he was deeply interested in the conservation of the forests which still clothed our mountainous regions. Thus he was one of the original members of the Appalachian Club, and served as its president in 1887.
On January 15, 1902, he died suddenly of gout of the heart while he was standing in Harvard Square intending to leave Cambridge to attend a meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History. As Professor "William H. Dall says in his biography published in 1902:
No one who had the privilege of Hyatt's acquaintance but will join in testimony to his high-minded scientific integrity; the infectiousness of his hearty enthusiasm; the fertility of his imagination, which yet was always controlled by constant reference to experience and obsenation; and the general atmosphere of good-fellowship which he diffused. Unpretentious, open-minded, a constant example of clean living, high thinking and unassuming kindness to all about him, an ideal husband and father, a steadfast friend; we shall not soon look upon his like again.
He lived in a large wooden house built in the New England Colonial style on Francis Avenue in Cambridge. This place he named "Norton's "Wood," for it was adjacent to the forest which still remained upon the old estate of Professor Charles Eliot Norton. The open-handed hospitality of his home was a heritage from his youthful years at "Wansbeck" in Baltimore, his house being a center for that delightful intellectual social life of the days when Cambridge still retained its traditions as a college town apart from the overwhelming influence of Boston. None of his three children sought to follow him in the study of science, although it may be of interest to observe that both of his daughters became sculptors, the scientific accuracy of their work being remarkable even apart from its artistic merit.
After his death, biographies were written by C. E. Beecher in the American Journal of Science, W. O. Crosby in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, Samuel Henshaw in Science, William H. Dall in The Popular Science Monthly, and the Boston Society of Natural History published an account of the proceedings of its Hyatt Memorial
