Memories of The New York Botanical Garden, 1948-1957Author(s): Richard S. CowanSource: Brittonia, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1996), pp. 355-358Published by: Springer on behalf of the New York Botanical Garden PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2807796 .

Accessed: 25/06/2014 05:42

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Springer and New York Botanical Garden Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Brittonia.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.214 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 05:42:06 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Memories of The New York Botanical Garden, 1948-1957

RICHARD S. COWAN

Cowan, R. S. (Western Australian Herbarium, George Street, PO. Box 104, Como, West- ern Australia, WA 6152, Australia). Memories of The New York Botanical Garden: 1948- 1957. Brittonia 48: 355-358. 1996.-Memories of systematic botany at The New York Botanical Garden from 1948 to 1957 are given.

In 1948, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, life was beginning to return to what passed for normal after the end of World War II. The arrival of John Wurdack and me, recently discharged veterans, as graduate students at The New York Botanical Garden, marked a revival of the earlier practice of having students at the Garden who would at the same time be studying at Columbia University for the doctoral degree. To John and me, our appointment as Technical Assistants in the herbarium seemed a near-miraculous oppor- tunity to expand our knowledge of things botan- ical, especially of tropical plants. Very few young students, particularly in 1948, had the chance to learn on the job the characteristics of whole families by means of actually identifying great quantities of backlogged specimens. But more than that, we could often talk with the col- lectors themselves, so that the dried fragments of giant tropical trees glued to herbarium sheets seemed to come to life, and we looked forward to joining the elite ranks of Garden collectors.

Instruction in systematic botany at the Garden was informal to say the least, but one couldn't ask for a better, more effective learning experi- ence than I received in just this manner! There was an almost unbelievable backlog of non-re- search kinds of work awaiting graduate stu- dents-making identifications, filing specimens, and extracting loans, to name but a few. One of my first jobs was to identify several hundred specimens in a large collection of Brazilian plants made by Adolfo Ducke, the dean of Am- azonian botany. With only such tools as the Pflanzenfamilien, Hutchinson, and a preliminary key in Portuguese, I muddled along, learning as I went the tropical members of numerous fami- lies. Sharing discoveries with each other helped

John and me to learn more rapidly than either would have done alone. The other formative in- fluence, in this regard, was the opportunity to discuss our newfound information with staff. For example, I "discovered" that even sterile plants of Indigofera could be recognized by the malpighian hairs on vegetative parts, and, in fact, I thought it might be worth a published note somewhere. When I mentioned this to Joe Mon- achino, who was particularly good at recogniz- ing taxa represented only by a scrap, he disa- bused me of the novelty of my discovery quick- ly (albeit kindly).

Another of the large collections I was as- signed to identify included some 600 numbers of Frere Wilson-Browne, an Anglican priest working in what was then British Guiana. It was a good set of plants, mostly from the southern savannas and mountains; in working it over, I found a number of novelties which I published as one of my first papers in the Garden Memoirs, along with notes on all the collections. (The col- lector was so pleased that he asked if I would like to have his set, in original bindings, of A. P. De Candolle's Prodromus which he believed was slowly disintegrating in the tropical heat and humidity. Needless to say, I accepted his gen- erosity, and the volumes form part of my library in Australia.) Because of these experiences, and several others like it, I was able to choose the plant group on which I would spend most of my research career-the legumes.

Fortunately there were staff members who were able and willing to answer our questions and who intimately shaped our concepts of bi- ological species: Bassett Maguire had a broad knowledge of tropical plants; Joe Monachino was particularly good at routine identifications,

Brittonia, 48(3), 1996, pp. 355-358. ISSUED: 16 Oct 1996 C 1996, by The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY 10458-5126

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.214 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 05:42:06 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

356 BRITTONIA [VOL. 48

especially of plants of economic importance; Ed Alexander had a phenomenal memory of all manner of plants; and from "Red" Camp I came to realize how variable taxa can be throughout their range, as he illustrated by his mass-col- lecting of blueberries over long distances. The paper Camp had written with Gilly on the nature of species brought home, to me at least, the idea that the term "species" has many meanings, de- pending on the manner of origin of the entities; while no one has taken up the terms for the dif- ferent kinds of species described there, it is an important paper conceptually, one with which all young taxonomists should be acquainted. It was especially significant to me, for I came aboard

in September 1948 from the University of Ha- waii, where I had just been awarded a master's degree in botany, based in part on a revision of an endemic genus of Urticaceae. That revision I found extremely frustrating, in part because I lacked the very basic idea of biological taxon- omy-that all taxa vary within themselves and that it is the task of the taxonomist to determine where the discontinuities lie and to interpret them. Nowadays, of course, young taxonomists have a much larger repertoire of techniques to assess such discontinuities in their studies, but the basic idea of the diversity of taxa is still an important starting point.

In those days, the lunch table was a place where we could learn more of what we wanted to know than we could learn in most formal classes. H. A. Gleason was the Head Curator when we arrived; his quiet wisdom and wit were to enliven many of our early days, especially at the lunch table. The table itself was a long rect- angle with a hot plate on a low stand under the big windows overlooking the garden entry-way. Regular to semi-regular members of the table included, in addition to Gleason (who was an early descriptive plant ecologist and taxono- mist), W H. Camp (philosopher and taxonomist, as well as raconteur extraordinaire), Bassett Ma- guire (the most active tropical plant collector at the time), D. P. Rogers (mycologist and a former friend in Hawaii), A. B. Stout (a highly regarded plant breeder, especially of day lilies), B. 0. Dodge (whose contributions in cytology and ge- netics are still cited as classics), W. R. Rickett (bibliographer, general botanist, and classicist), and Carol Woodward (editor of the Journal and other Garden publications). Sometimes it was botanical gossip that dominated the conversa- tion, but as often as not, one or the other of those present posed a question that resulted in a vig- orous but rarely acrimonious debate-some- times on the nature of species, what the Code really meant by a certain passage, or the fine fingerprints of plant groups that enable the ini- tiated to recognize them. It was from Don Rog- ers and Dr. Rickett (I could never bring myself to address him by his first name!) that I learned to write Latin passably, and from that experience I learned that botanical Latin can be correctly written in more than one way-a most valuable discovery. My two mentors rarely agreed com- pletely, so I would do my best to write a de- scription and then show it to one or the other;

U

FIG. 1. Richard C. Cowan, graduate student, 1948- 1952, and staff member of The New York Botanical Garden, 1952-1957, at a party given in his honor at The New York Botanical Garden, on the occasion of his retirement from the Smithsonian Institution in 1985. Dr. Cowan did not retire from botany; he con- tinues to work on the legumes in Western Australia.

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.214 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 05:42:06 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

19961 COWAN: MEMORIES, 1948-1957 357

after making the many necessary changes, the second authority would have a go at it. The re- sult represented the best of two experienced pro- fessionals, plus the efforts of a neophyte.

Finally, John's and my dream of seeing first- hand the wonders of the tropics was realized when, in October 1950, after several weeks of planning, John and I set out with Bassett Ma- guire for what was to be a five-month expedition to the interior of Venezuela. During that period we explored seven mountains, where we col- lected a large series of flowering plants, many of which were undescribed, and some crypto- gams. Although there were many lessons to be learned from the trip, one of the most valuable, with Bassett as the instructor, was the proper preparation of specimens. Although John and I had made specimens previously, I was complete- ly unaware of the many fine points he showed us. There are collectors who made more collec- tions than we did, but none could surpass the quality of collections prepared by Bassett (and, after some experience, by ourselves). We were not collecting "snippets" but collections with a dozen or more duplicates containing, in addition to the attached flowers and fruits, all the loose parts as could be accommodated in the sheet. I made other collecting trips in 1954-1955, to Amapa' in northeastern Brazil, Montagne de Kaw in French Guiana, to the Nassau Mountains in Suriname, and to northwestern Guyana, all for the purpose of trying to relate plant cover to bauxite and manganese ore bodies of known dis- tribution and quality as a mineral prospecting tool. John made numerous subsequent expedi- tions with Bassett, sometimes also with Bassett's wife, Celia. In spite of the discomforts and ill- nesses of fieldwork in the tropics at that time, I will always maintain that as a program of learn- ing, nothing can supplant the experience of field study, including the excitement of finding what seemed even in the field to be, and often were, novelties. Knowledge of what constitutes a ma- jor taxonomic group is partly knowing its char- acteristics but also, and more important, acquir- ing a "feel" for its identity and relationships, and for this purpose, hands-on experience can- not be surpassed. The results of these explora- tions were published serially over a period of several years in the Memoirs, under the title Bot- any of the Guayana Highland.

The Garden then, as now, was no ivory tower for esoteric dilettantes, and we students soon be-

came a part of the regular Saturday afternoon lecture series in the old auditorium. We were expected to share our experiences in a way so as to interest the general public in botany, es- pecially taxonomic botany. I especially remem- ber the twice daily sessions John and I gave in one of the ranges in the conservatory on the construction and use of blowguns after our re- turn from Venezuela, complete with a demon- stration of the device! Similarly, we shared Sat- urday duty when the botanist on duty was there to answer the public's questions, from the most trivial to the most profound and unanswerable. These experiences with the public were also a valuable part of our education, for if a science cannot articulate its worth as well as its needs, it tends to wither on the vine, so to speak.

Sometime just before Dr. Gleason retired from the head curatorship, Bassett took John and me aside and pointed out that someone should take up the Melastomataceae, which Gleason had spent much of his life studying, including gath- ering data on types and other important histori- cal collections. There was, he said, also the need to have a specialist on the staff for the neotrop- ical legumes, and he was giving us first oppor- tunity to assume these roles. It didn't take John all that long to decide he would like the melas- tomes, and me scarcely longer to take on the legumes, for I had become especially interested in the caesalpinioid taxa through identifying col- lections of them in the backlog. We selected a genus each from our new specialties as the sub- ject for our doctoral dissertations, which we fin- ished in due time and to the satisfaction of our respective committees.

The other part of our education that John and I were to gain while at the Garden was to be acquired by attending graduate courses at Co- lumbia University, where John and I were known as the "Gold-dust Twins" because of our irreverent behavior. Regina Duffy, the teaching assistant in our botany labs, declared that either of us would swear to the truth of what the other had said, even when he had not heard it! I think that both she and Prof. Matzke were pleased to see the last of us. To attend Columbia we had to make a time-consuming subway expedition to Morningside Heights several times a week. I can say in retrospect, although I was as certain of it at the time, that the most boring, unprofitable course of my academic life was Sam Trelease's plant physiology, which both of us were re-

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.214 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 05:42:06 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

358 BRITTONIA [VOL. 48

quired to take. John solved the problem though: as Sam droned on in his quiet tones, John sup- ported his head on his hand in such a way that the light reflected from his glasses, hiding the fact that he was sound asleep. But he still beat me at grades!

So much has changed in the herbarium since John and I occupied space there that I find it difficult on present-day visits to locate the places I used to know so well. It is not difficult, how- ever, to remember the drafty, poorly lighted, barn-like quality the place had then. The win- dows in my room opened out near the lunch ta- ble at a stand bearing the large volumes of cut- and-pasted Index Kewensis and overlooked the end of Mosholu Parkway; like all the other win- dows, my window let in almost as much winter cold as it deflected. At nights, after I began to

work in earnest on my dissertation, it was nec- essary to wear a warm hat and coat and wrap my feet and legs in whatever was at hand in order to sit at the binocular microscope to make notes.

Whatever discomfort or privation there may have been, the experience of being at the Garden as a student and later as a staff member was an unparalleled, truly unique opportunity that has shaped all the events of my botanical life since, and I am forever grateful for the nine years I spent there in achieving a measure of botanical maturity. The Garden has always represented to me the ultimate in terms of team spirit, where one could solve many important taxonomic problems with minimal material support. It sure- ly is one of the principal centers for taxonomic research in the world, and I am proud to be an alumnus.

To further botanical science by encouraging taxonomic research and publishing the results,

THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN has suspended publication charges for papers submitted

for publication in Brittonia for 1996.

Those working in the field of systematic botany are encouraged to submit original research papers to:

Editor-in-Chief, Brittonia THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN

Bronx, New York 10458-5126 U.S.A.

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.214 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 05:42:06 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions