To the FWGNA group,
November's essay focused
on Frank Collins Baker, a modest man of modest means who rose to
prominence in twentieth-century American malacology. This month
we'll look at the life and contributions of Calvin Goodrich, a
contemporary whose career offers a number of interesting comparisons.
Like
Baker, Calvin Goodrich came from a middle class background and
held no advanced degree. He was born in Chicago in 1874 and spent
his youth in Kansas, graduating from the University of Kansas in
1895. Goodrich then embarked on a career in journalism, serving
as a reporter and then editor for The Kansas City Star, The Cleveland
Leader, The Toledo Blade, The Detroit Journal, and the Newark
Star-Eagle.
It was during his tenure with The Toledo Blade (1908 - 1917) that
Goodrich initiated correspondence with the two gentlemen who shaped his
second career, A. E. Ortmann of the Carnegie Museum and Bryant Walker
of Detroit. Van der Schalie (1)
reports that during this period Goodrich began riding the street cars
out of Toledo into the surrounding countryside to collect
mollusks. And in 1913 he arranged to join Ortmann on a field trip
to southwest Virginia, an event that seems to have profoundly affected
his life, at age 39. Goodrich began publishing short papers on
pleurocerid snails in The Nautilus,
obtained appointment as an honorary curator at the University of
Michigan Museum of Zoology in 1924, and became a full-time curator at
UMMZ in 1926, when he formally retired from the newspaper business.
From 1924 until his (second) retirement from the UMMZ twenty years
later, Calvin Goodrich traveled widely in the American south and
published about 50 works of scholarship, almost entirely on our
mutually favorite family of gastropods (2). Between 1934 and
1941, he published a series of eight remarkable papers which deserve to
be better known, his "Studies of the Gastropod Family
Pleuroceridae." In those works we see a taxonomist born into
19th-century typology struggling with, and ultimately accepting, a
modern understanding of intrapopulation variation.
In "Studies" Number IV (1935), for example, Goodrich focused on the
Coosa River of Georgia and Alabama, inhabited by six "forms
recognizable as subspecies" of Goniobasis caelatura. He tabulated
variation in shell sculpture (two categories of plication and three
categories of striation) and in overall shape (ratio of shell diameters
measured at two spots). He observed that "In a general sense, the
variation from conic to cylindrical shape is in a downstream
direction. The same thing is true of variation from smoothness to
sculpture." He concluded that "These several forms, however
unlike one another they sometimes appear, are nevertheless of the same
genetic stock, and they constitute a single, fairly compact group of
mollusks." For 1935, such an insight was genuinely prescient.
Today Goodrich's reputation rests primarily on the review of the
Pleuroceridae of North America he published as a series of brief works
- the first six between 1939 and 1942 "in preparation for a
molluscan check list undertaken by the American Malacological Union,"
the ultimate fate of which I am not aware. Two additional works
were added to the series in 1944. These papers are short and
spare - they include no descriptions, figures, or indeed biological
information of any sort, except ranges. What Goodrich did,
however, was to boil something in excess of 500 specific nomena of
pleurocerids down into a bit more than 100. Many names were
synonymized, without comment, and many others were simply
omitted. The 100 nomena recognized by Goodrich have survived in
the malacological literature to the present day, while those that
Goodrich synonymized or ignored have essentially disappeared, except as
dusty labels in the forgotten drawers of historic collections (3).
One might argue that such an approach was arbitrary, and
heavy-handed. But Goodrich's judgments were informed by the
seven-year study of morphological variation in the Pleuroceridae that
preceded them, which he published separately. He was one of the
first American malacologists to understand intrapopulation variation,
and it was on the basis of his 1934 - 41 "Studies" that his 1939-1944
checklists were compiled.
And Goodrich's review has proven to be of great use to malacologists
working in American freshwaters today. My 25 years of research on
the population genetics of pleurocerids in the South suggests to me
that the total number of biological species in this country will prove
to be far less than 500, and indeed less than 100. I haven't
found a biological species that Calvin Goodrich missed.
Goodrich's career followed that of F. C. Baker by almost exactly a half
generation - he was born seven years after Baker and trailed him in
death by 12 years, in 1954. This was an important
half-generation. Because from the late 1930's to the mid-1950's,
the architects of the "modern synthesis" were fashioning the stones cut
by Darwin and Mendel into the science of evolutionary biology as we
know it today. Frank Collins Baker, for all his tremendous
talent, training, and experience, always considered species to be the
subjective constructs of taxonomists such as himself. Any new
specimen not matching a previously-described type was, to Baker, a new
species. But Goodrich was beginning to think of species as
populations or groups of populations, not as individual types.
And populations vary. And with that revelation came the dawn of
modern evolutionary science.
Keep in touch,
Rob
(1) Van der Schalie, H. (1955). Calvin Goodrich 1874 - 1954. Nautilus 68: 135-142.
(2) Goodrich's complete
bibliography published by Rosewater J. (1959) Calvin
Goodrich; a bibliography and catalogue of his species. Occas. Pprs. Mollusks, Mus. Comp. Zool., Harvard 2(24): 189-208. A partial bibliography is available from Kevin Cuming's website at INHS
(3) For a complete catalogue of pleurocerid names, see
Graf, D. L. (2001) The cleansing of the Augean Stables, or a
lexicon of the nominal species of the Pleuroceridae (Gastropoda:
Prosobranchia) of recent North America, north of Mexico.
Walkerana 12 (27) 1 - 124.
FWGNA home...