Orville Adelbert Derby was born on July 23, 1851, in Kellogsville, Cayuga, New York.

He was an American geologist and geographer who worked in Brazil. He studied geology at the Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., graduating in 1873. While a student, he was invited in 1870 by his professor Charles Frederick Hartt (1840–1878) to follow him in a study-travel to Brazil. After his graduation, Derby accepted a post of assistant professor at Cornell and briefly substituted for Hartt during another travel to Brazil in 1874. The same year, he defended his doctoral thesis on the carboniferous brachiopoda in the Amazon. In 1875, he travelled to Brazil on another Geological Commission of the Empire of Brazil and in 1877, he decided to accept a post at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro. He also became a member and director of the Geographic and Geological Commission of São Paulo (1886-1904). Derby founded the first Botanical Gardens in São Paulo ("Horto Botânico"). In 1906, he was nominated to the Brazilian Geographic and Geological Survey. He worked in many domains of the geological sciences, such as mineralogy, economic geology, physical geography, cartography, petrography, meteorology, archeology, and paleontology. From 1873 to 1915 he published 173 papers on the geology of Brazil. He was also the publisher of one of the first geological maps of Brazil in 1915.

He led a solitary existence, living mostly in hotel rooms where he committed suicide on November 27, 1914 or 1915, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.