To the FWGNA group,
Frank
Collins Baker (1) is a hero of mine. Born in Warren, Rhode Island
in 1867, he grew up playing with seashells brought to him by his
seafaring grandfather. He attended a small business college and
spent a year at Brown University before getting his big break, a Jessup
Scholarship to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia in
1889. At the ANSP he studied under Henry Pilsbry and took part in
an expedition to Mexico. Then after several years working for
"Ward's Natural Science Establishment" in Rochester (NY), Baker was
offered a curatorship at the Chicago Academy of Science (1894 - 1915),
where he produced his two-volume "Mollusca of the Chicago Area" (1898,
1902) and his monograph on the Lymnaeidae (1911). A change in
research climate at the Chicago Academy sent Baker to the
newly-established New York College of Forestry on the campus of
Syracuse University for three years, during which time he completed his
monumental study of Oneida Lake. In 1918 he accepted a
curatorship at the University of Illinois Museum of Natural History
(Urbana), where he crowned his productive career with his "Life of the
Pleistocene or Glacial Period" (1920), the two-volume "Mollusca of
Wisconsin" (1928), his "Fieldbook of Illinois Land Snails" (1939), and
his monograph on the Planorbidae, published posthumously (1945).
Baker came from a middle class background, and had just the B.S. degree
he earned at the Chicago School of Science in 1896. He was
described by H. J. van Cleave (2) as "slight in stature, unpretentious
in attitude, mild in disposition, kindly and charitable." Yet his
lifetime bibliography extends to 360 titles, including several works to
which students of American malacology often refer today.
I can still remember the marvel I felt when, as a graduate student at
the ANSP 25 years ago, I first pulled Baker's Oneida Lake monograph off
the dusty shelves of the malacology library. The volume was
actually three publications of the New York State College of Forestry
bound together: Technical Publication #4 (1916), Technical Publication
#6 (1918), and Circular #21 (1918). The first work ("The Relation
of Mollusks to Fish," 366 pages) was a meticulous description of the
diet and habitats of every element of the Oneida Lake molluscan
community and a catalogue of all their "enemies," piscine and
otherwise. The second work ("Productivity of Invertebrate Fish
Food ... with Special Reference to Mollusks," 264 pages) reported
Baker's quantitative survey of Lower South Bay, concluding that his
study area contained "4,704 million mollusks, and 3,062 million
associated animals." The third work ("The Relation of Shellfish
to Fish," 34 pages) was an abstract of the two larger works, intended
for wider circulation.
Baker's Oneida Lake research was at the vanguard of the new science of
Ecology. He took quantitative samples using an Ekman grab, a
device so new that he felt obliged to figure it and describe it in
detail. His publications featured gigantic fold-out maps of his
study areas and equally gigantic fold-out data tables recording the raw
counts of every snail, bug, and glob of algae he collected in all CDXII
samples he took from Lower South Bay. There are scores of
charming photographs where he spilled out the entire catch from
selected samples for the camera ... hundreds of tiny little chironomid
larvae pushed to one corner and wads of macrophyte knotted up
below. The work was a labor of love, and a lighthouse for future
studies of benthic ecology (3).
But for lasting influence, few works in American malacology can rival
Baker's monographs on the Lymnaeidae (1911) and Planorbidae
(1945). Both of these works featured meticulous scholarship and
detailed anatomical drawings executed with great skill. His
"Lymnaeidae of North and Middle America, Recent and Fossil" (Chicago
Academy of Sciences Sp. Publ. #3) ran to 539 pages plus 60 plates,
providing descriptions of shell, radula, and genitalia, as well as
ranges and life history notes for the 95 species and subspecies he
considered valid, organized into seven genera. His "Molluscan
Family Planorbidae" (University of Illinois Press) was intended to be
worldwide in scope, with Part I ("Classification and General
Morphology," 212 pages) providing complete descriptions of the 36
genera he recognized and Part II ("Planorbidae inhabiting North &
South America," 21 pages) describing 26 new species and
"varieties." Baker's plan to provide detailed accounts of all the
planorbid species then recognized in the Americas was cut short by his
death. But his editor (van Cleave) was able to assemble 60 plates
which would have accompanied the body of Baker's Part II text, together
with their explanations, and add them to the 81 plates the author had
intended for Part I.
F. C. Baker was innocent of the modern synthesis. It was in 1942,
the year Baker died, that Ernst Mayr first formally proposed (and
forcefully advocated) the biological species concept (4). Even in
his last work, Baker was still attaching Latin nomena to "varieties" of
gastropods, as for example, "Helisoma subcrenatum perdisjunctum is
similar to disjunctum but is much smaller, about the size of
oregonense, but lacks the characteristic shape of the aperture of the
last named form."
Baker did not enjoy the understanding of intraspecific variation that
informs the research of most evolutionary biologists today. But
while he kept one foot firmly planted in 19th century typology, Baker
strode forward to the 20th, bearing a profound appreciation for the
biology of the animals he was classifying - anatomy, physiology,
ecology, and more. I think of him as the "freshwater
Pilsbry." His contributions rank second only to those of Thomas
Say in their impact on our understanding of the pulmonate gastropods
inhabiting lakes and rivers in America today.
Keep in touch,
Rob
(1) A photo of the older Baker, together with a brief bio and partial bibliography, is available from Kevin Cummings' site at INHS.
(2) The biography above is based largely on "A Memorial to Frank
Collins Baker" by H. J. van Cleave, published as pages xvii - xxxvi in
Baker (1945). Baker's complete bibliography is available in that
work as well. Van Cleave also published briefer obituaries in
Science 95: 568 (1942) and The Nautilus 56: 97-99 (1943).
(3) To learn more about the Oneida Lake molluscan fauna, and its sad
fate, see Harman & Forney (1970 - Limnol & Oceanog 15:454),
Dillon (1981 - Am. Nat. 118:83) or my book (Dillon 2000) Chapter 9.
(4) For a nice historical review of the biological species concept, see Coyne (1994 - Evolution 48:19).
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