Amateurs and Professionals in Malacology, 1900-1950

The Annual Meeting of the Conchological Society,

October 1st, 1904. (Journal of Conchology, Vol 11, frontispiece.)

Sir Charles Maurice Yonge (1899-1986)

John Zachary Young (1907-1997)

Introducing the meeting on the leading personalities who shaped modern malacology, Professor Robert Cameron foresaw that the meeting would raise questions about the future of malacology, because undergraduates learn less about particular groups and the skills and knowledge may become concentrated in the hands of amateurs. Various speakers suggested what roles the amateur would have. Naturalists now return in middle age and after retirement, much as Boycott and Quick delighted in malacology, and applied their rigorous scientific approach to it. Conservation has given natural history a new purpose, but amateurs need focussed projects, as shown by their role in vegetation mapping schemes and the solution to the migration mystery by the collective activities of amateur ornithologists. The amateurs remembered at this meeting were not 'stamp collectors'; their recordings were made to answer specific questions - even if (as in describing shell colour morphs) they sometimes could not see the wood for the trees. The last two talks, on C M Yonge and J Z Young, described successful professionals - meticulous, dedicated and prolific, directing research to specific questions.

The meeting, the second on the theme of malacological pioneers, was organised by Elizabeth Platts and Robert Cameron for The Malacological Society of London, The Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, The Linnean Society of London and The Society for the History of Natural History and was held at the Linnean Society of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, on Saturday 22nd November 1997. Robert Cameron , David Reid and Bryan Clarke chaired the sessions.The meeting was well attended and afterwards many participants attended a wine reception in the Linnean Society, followed by an Italian meal at a nearby restaurant.

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David Allen (Wellcome Institute)

Until the 1880s, collecting and description persisted as the dominant mode of research in the life and earth sciences. The techniques and equipment were simple, inexpensive and accessible to almost anyone. Professionals differed from amateurs only in that they were paid and tended to be privileged with continual exposure to a larger range of specimens and literature. Academicisation, abnormally late in arriving in Britain, came as an abruptly divisive influence: emphasis on processes and tissues, which required study in laboratories and the use of costly materials and equipment, produced a distance which served to underline non-amateur status. The rise of genetics and statistics only widened that distance from a little-changed natural history. Ecology, promisingly reintegrating at first, latterly disappointed hopes by becoming dauntingly complex in turn. Amateur research recovered its balance by exploiting its special asset of large numbers of observers well spread geographically. Country-wide recording and mapping schemes thereby made possible have culminated in ornithology generating professionals of its own, without the agency of either government or academics.

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Graham Oliver (National Museum of Wales)

The undisputed aesthetic appeal of the shell drove the passion of collectors to amass large private collections which ultimatley formed the core of our museum holdings. This community of enthusiasts were the main contributors to alpha taxonomy, and this continued well into the twentieth century. Today the contribution of the shell collector has been down graded and great distinctions are made between the merits of institutional science and the labours of amateurs. A number of issues arise from this change which are explored largely through the life and work of J R le B Tomlin (d 1955), Britain's last great private collector. Was it simply private wealth that allowed him to make such a large contribution or was it the state of the science at the time? Was there less distinction made between the collector and the scientist? How would Tomlin be regarded today, has his work endured? Finally is there a role for the collector/amateur today or has modern theory/techniques driven the study of molluscs into the elite surroundings of research institutions?

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Nick Evans (National History Museum)

Boycott and Quick were perhaps two of the last workers in British malacology who represented the lack of division between the amateur and professional malacologist. Although both were eminent in their medical fields (Boycott was Professor of Physiology, and Quick an opthalmic surgeon), they made major contributions to the taxonomy, systematics and ecology of freshwater and terrestrial snails and land slugs. Boycott's paper on the ecology and distribution of freshwater snails in Britain remains a key work today. His classic experiments in breeding Lymnaea are still of relevance to genetics, while Quick's work on the taxonomy of British slugs remains a basis for current studies.

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Ian Killeen (Malacological Services, Felixstowe)

The British Isles has perhaps the most comprehensively mapped land and freshwater mollusc fauna with historical records going back 120 years. This results from the insight, dedication and enthusiasm of a small group of mainly `amateur' malacologists, directed by J W Taylor, a printer, and W D Roebuck, a solicitor, who were adept at getting records from underworked vice-counties. Two notable contributors were A E Boycott and A E Ellis. Their work involved far more than the collection and compilation of records. Both realised the value of combining recording with detailed ecological information at national, local and site level. Boycott's classic works on the distribution and ecology of the British fauna remains unparalleled, whilst Ellis's 1926 text on British Snails, although dismissed by the author as 'a youthful indiscretion', remained the standard work for over 40 years.

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Bryan Clarke (University of Nottingham)

John T Gulick had a remarkable career. He wrote the seminal work on Hawaiian land snails. Struck by the changes in shell form and colour that were associated with isolation in the valleys of Oahu, and by the fact that these changes bore little or no relation to the physical or biotic environment, he stressed, perhaps for the first time, the importance of random processes in evolution. He took Darwin to task for paying insufficient attention to the role of geographical isolation in the origin of species, and Darwin expressed great interest in his observations. As a young man he took part in the Californian Gold Rush. Later he became a missionary in Japan, and at one point was unfairly censured for too much time over his conchological interests.

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James Murray (University of Virginia)

H E Crampton was something of a polymath in biology. He discovered the embryological basis of sinistrality in the development of Physella heterostropha, and carried out early parabiotic experiments with the large Saturnid moths. He demonstrated stabilizing selection on the body measurements of Philosamia cynthia, and he participated in collecting along a biological transect from Georgetown, Guyana to the slopes of Mount Roriama. It is, however, on his "Studies on the Variation, Distribution, and Evolution of the Genus Partula" that his reputation rests (see figure). He concluded from this work (1) that the variation in the colour, banding, and chirality of the shells was Mendelian in nature, (2) that these characters are unaffected by selection, and (3) that active evolution was demonstrable in the short time between his successive samples. Although the second and third of these conclusions appear to be badly flawed, the Partula studies nevertheless exerted an important influence on the Modern Synthesis of Evolutionary Biology via the seminal works of Th Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley, and Ernst Mayr.

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Laurence Cook (University of Manchester)

Many snail species show variation in shell characters, both between and within populations. In some there are questions of specific distinctness to be settled while in others the variability is related to geographical distribution. Charles Oldham and A W Stelfox contributed much to taxonomy and distribution records in a variety of molluscan species, and in so doing developed an interest in heredity. As Stelfox wrote in 1922, "If I may offer a suggestion to future workers, go in for breeding!" From then on their mutual interest in genetics took up much of their time and continued until their deaths.

Oldham was cautious, conscientious and precise in his experiments and records. He founded the comparative study of shell colour and pattern polymorphisms in helicids by doing for Arianta arbustorum and Helix aspersa what was being done for Cepaea. He did not publish the results himself, however. Stelfox was less careful with his breeding and more confident and quixotic in his manner, but he did publish at an early date (1915, 1918) two much-quoted papers on H. aspersa and C. nemoralis. Their work featured in the exhibit presented by Cyril Diver at the Sixth International Congress of Genetics (1932) which considered Mendelian expression, linkage groups, gene action (the developmental stage at which a character is displayed), homologies between species and natural polymorphisms. The results became part of the general body of genetical knowledge, although in genetics the names of the amateurs who did the work have been forgotten. Reflecting on the justice of this neglect, it is appropriate to remember a remark of J B S Haldane, who said he felt greatly complimented "when people refer to something which I discovered....as a fact the whole world knows - to quote good old Aunt Jobiska in Lear's poem about the Pobble - without mentioning me at all. To have got into the tradition of science in that way is to me more pleasing than to be specially mentioned."

The story of Oldham and Stelfox, together with Boycott and Diver with whom they worked, shows how the amateur and professional threads interweave and how important the contribution of the amateur can be.

Genetic variation in Partula suturalis.

Crampton's names for the morphs:

top row, left to right: (dextral) atra, apex and bisecta;

bottom row, left to right: (sinistral) cestata, strigata and frenata.

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Robert Cameron (University of Sheffield)

The famous 1950 paper of Cain and Sheppard broke a long-standing concensus that the shell colour and banding polymorphism in Cepaea was a product of genetic drift, with no selective significance. In fact, many amateur malacologists at the beginning of the century also thought that variation in Cepaea was influenced by selection. They had to struggle to describe the variation in ways which could be analysed, and they mostly lacked a rigorous approach.

By the 1920s professional opinion turned against natura selection, and the problem was taken up by Cyril Diver, technically an amateur, but one who kept up with the latest theoretical debates, and met and corresponded with the þgreat namesþ of evolutionary biology. His own meticulous fieldwork and theoretical arguments persuaded nearly everybody that the variation was "neutral". This made Cain and Sheppard's achievement the more remarkable; they started a research programme which runs and runs.

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Brian Morton (The University of Hong Kong)

Born in Yorkshire in 1899, C M Yonge attended the school where his father was headmaster. At first, he considered a career in history, later in agriculture and forestry, but the dissection of a frog converted him to zoology. First a physiologist, his interests in all aspects of marine science broadened and then condensed back to his first love - the Bivalvia and the seemingly inexplicable multifarious adaptations shown by the group on such a simple plan.

The toss of a coin with his friend Freddie Russell decided that he would write the chapter on corals for "The Seas", and this indirectly led to his participation in, and then leadership of, the expedition to the Great Barrier Reef. The student of almost any bivalve has to consult his authoritative papers on the various superfamilies of the class and take cognisance of his insights into its evolution. A publication history of 62 years has made his memory unforgettable.

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John Messenger (University of Sheffield)

Although far too broad a scientist to be labelled "malacologist", J Z Young, who died in July 1997 at the age of 90, added to our knowledge of one class of molluscs - the cephalopods - for nearly 70 years. His fundamental work on squid giant fibres and on Octopusmemory has been matched by a series of classic papers on the eye, the statocyst and the radula that have much to teach all who study molluscs. As a keen walker and lover of the countryside he alsoinvestigated, over the years, the numbers and distribution of Helix pomatia in southern England.

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The papers from the meeting will be published in the Archives of Natural History, the journal of The Society for the History of Natural History.

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PLAYERS" MEETING IN THE LIBRARY OF THE LINNEAN SOCIETY

David Allen ; Graham Oliver (Editor, Journal of Conchology) and Richard Cameron; Jan Light, Ian Killeen and Jane Reynolds (Secretary, Conchological Society).

James Murray and Bryan Clarke; Brian Morton and Laurence Cook; David Reid (President, Malacological Society) and Dai Roberts (Treasurer, Malacological Society).

Barry Colville (Past President, Conchological Society); John Messenger (centre) with Damon and Kate

Moore (J Z Young's youngest daughter); Phil Rainbow (Keeper of Zoology, Natural History Museum) and Graham Oliver.

Bryan Clarke, Richard Preece and Rich Meyrick; Laurence Cook, Peter Skelton and Bill Bailey (Bulletin editor); Peter Skelton (Past President, Malacological Society).