The Naturalists: Hulbrandt Boschma

 

 

Hilbrandt Boschma's work revising the taxonomy of the Milleporids is a monument to his painstaking study of the morphological species specific characters.  

 

The link above directs to a wikipedia page that presents a general biographical picture of his career.   As one may see from a casual reading of this Wikipedia entry, Boschma's career went far beyond the painstaking work of revision of the taxonomy of Millepora spp.   

 

Lu Eldredge, a professor of mine at the University of Guam,  told of Boschma hiding in between shelves at the Rijksmuseum at Leiden, from the Nazi's during the occupation of  The Netherlands.  Due to my interest in the Holocaust---born during my formative years, as I read Mein Kampf and the stories of the exodus from Germany to Israel---this story of Boschma's trials and tribulations has remained with.  I recently Googled for more information about his life, and ultimately stumbled upon the accounts in Wikipedia.

 

His role at the Rijksmuseum  was far more crucial than his zoological work might suggest.  He was, at some point during the occupation, director of the museum.  Important in my mind was to learn he had saved the scientific instruments in the institution, concealing them---apparently in a manner similar to the way, as I had I heard from Professor Eldredge, he hid his person from the Nazis.  

 

I wonder how, as director of the Museum he could have kept himself concealed during those years.   

A PDF of his Eulogy is located here, in Dutch:

 https://dwc.knaw.nl/DL/levensberichten/PE00004104.pdf

  

I used Google Translate, through a convoluted sequence of running an OCR on the dutch pdf, downloading the textfile of this from gscan2pdf, opening on Google Docs,  using the translate tool to  translate to English, and saving as a PDF.  It would probably be faster and easier on Apple Infrastructure, but freedom is worth not dealing with that maze.

The English machine translated version is long.  It is appended temporarily at the end of this post.  (Perhaps I will link to a pdf at some point, depending on space available).  

Concerning experiences during World War II, an excerpt from a paper about Tinbergen is of great interest; it provides context, as well as insight into Niko Tinbergen and his work:

 

World War II. In May 1940 the Netherlands were overrun by the German forces. In 1941 most of the teaching staff of Leiden University resigned in protest against the treatment of their Jewish colleagues, and in 1942 many of them, including Tinbergen as well as many other of the most prominent figures in Dutch society (professors, cabinet ministers), were taken hostage by the Germans. They were to be the subject for reprisals after actions by the Dutch underground; in the end, some twenty of them were shot. The hostages were interned in a former training college for priests in Sint-Michielsgestel in the south of Holland.

Tinbergen was to spend two years in the hostage camp, in reasonable comfort but with the threat hanging over him. The inmates organized lectures, plays, and concerts, and there was considerable intellectual activity as well as political discussion. Tinbergen was able to write. One product of that time was a text in Dutch, Inleiding tot de diersociologre (Introduction to Animal sociology), published as a 184-page paperback after the war, in 1946. It was visually appealing, with many of his drawings, but it was never much of a success, having been written in a rather schoolmasterly style. There was a kaleidoscope of social behavior, with several arguments about behavior organization as in his previous publications. As an interesting kind of throwback, in places Tinbergen insisted that animals behave for the good of the species. Given the context in which it was written, it was not surprising that the author was not in top form. Another result of his hostage camp efforts was a series of handwritten and richly illustrated booklets about animals, for his children at home. Two of these were later published in English: Kleew (1947), about gulls, and The Tale of John Stickle(1954), about the behavior of sticklebacks.

After Tinbergen was finally released from the hostage camp in September 1944, he would spend seven more months under the German occupation, living with his family close to his field study sites near Hulshorst. Life in Leiden was too difficult in that period, known as the “hunger winter,” with serious shortages. 

 

The Naturalists: Sidney Hickson, a bold (and often wrong) authority

 [Here will be an account of some of Hickson's errors of interpretation.  He was an authority, often cited, often wrong.  A WORK IN :PROGRESS]

 

The Fantastical Life Cycle of Millepora was wrong 

Hickson was wrong about the nature of the life cycle of Millepora.  He presented a figure of insipient stages of male and female gametes, with absolute certainty...and absolute falsity.  Later, he admitted to the error.

 

 

The Ultimate Lumper

 Hickson argued that all species of genus Millepora were ecomorphs, and synonymized every one with Millepora alcicornis, a caribbean species.  Later, during WWII, Hulbrandt Boschma hid from the Nazis in Holland, in the archives of the Reichsmuseum in Leiden, while he painstakingly split this mass into substantially the same complex of species we know today.

 

 

The Naturalists: John Ellis, an eclectic naturalist and microscopist

[I starting writing this post several years ago in a separate blog.  Ellis is a favorite of the naturalists.  This deserves to be re-written.  For now, just some editing changes.] 

John Ellis was a student of Zoophytes, literally "animal plants."  Why did he consider Halimeda spp., calcifying green algae to be animals? This deserves some investigation. John Ellis deserves to be taken seriously on several accounts.  He is memorialized in the  "Ellis-type microscope" bearing his name.  This kind of microscope---also known as a "simple microscope"---is considered a botanical microscope, as well as an aquatic microscope.   The aquatic microscope figures prominently in early marine (and freshwater) zoological studies.  The glass stage can be either a concave shallow dish similar to a watch glass, or a flat glass plate, appropriate to whatever specimen is under observation.  Minute hydroids or bryozoans, for example, were investigated in this manner.   The clip can hold a specimen apart from the stage.  

 

These microscopes were important to many early zoologists. . Ellis was a Zoophytologist.  We now understand that the hybrid nature of zoophytes derives from it's existence as a "holobiont," a single organism that is a fusion of two symbiotic species that live in a cooperative arrangement, each benefiting from the other.  Another example, perhaps more familiar to some, is the lichen.  This organism exists as an obligatory fusion of an alga and a fungus; neither can live in isolation from the other.   

 

Zoophytes behaved like plants, in that they were attached and immovable, in many cases.   Corals, one of the most important groups of these, live only in shallow water, where sunlight can support photosynthesis.  Yet they exhibit intentional movement, like the animals they are.  Such organisms we now call  "holobionts,"  partnerships living a mutually beneficial relationship.  Often, such as in the case of corals, this partnership is "obligate: neither partner can carry out all functions to support life.   On coral reefs such relationships are common.   

 Zooxanthellae are dinoflagellates that live within corals, sea anemones, and upside-down jellyfishes.  These dinoflagellates employ subsidiary pigments, Xanthophylls in partnership with Chlorophyll.   

 Back to Ellis.  As I have recently learned, it was Ellis who originally described and named Halimeda spp. as Corallina.  Corallina opuntia, one of those species, is now called Halimeda opuntia, a common algae around coral reefs in Micronesia.    Wikimedia exhibits a copy of a plate from Ellis and Solander's publication in which Corallina spp. are described:

 

From Ellis and Solander ...

The Ellis-Type Aquatic Microscope

At https://microscope-antiques.com/ellis.html this scope is dated c.1765,  identified as a "Trembley-Ellis Type Aquatic Microscope."  Trembley is remembered for his extensive studies of Hydra.  It may well be that this aquatic microscope was designed by him, at least in part, for study of  Hydra.  One species of hydra is a holobiont, living in partnership with a single celled green algae.   

 

Such microscopes as these are "simple microscopes."   A concave glass---similar to a watchglass, serves as a stage, when viewing minute aquatic organisms.  

Image from https://microscope-antiques.com/ellis.html

 

Unlike our "compound microscopes," which have two or more lenses, simple microscopes have a single lens organized on a mechanism enabling the focusing of moving organisms on the stage, or in the watchglass.  The lens can be focused vertically, and swung from side to side to follow movement or search for interesting features.