FAMOUS ZOOLOGISTS 243

Leonhard Stejne er WALDO L. SCHMITT

It was in mid-January 1882, that A. K. Fisher and C. Hart Merriam, both recently graduated in medicine from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia Uni- versity, with a common interest in birds and mammals, journeyed to Washington to visit one of the leading American ornithol- ogists, Dr. Robert Ridgway. At work in Ridgway's office was a young Norwegian, Leonhard Stejneger, who had arrived in America scarcely three months before. He too was an ardent young naturalist who had studied medicine and who already had published several papers on European birds and one on Norwegian mammals. The three were about of an age: Stejneger, 31; Merriam, 27; Fisher, 26. Out of this chance meeting and their common inter- ests grew a rewarding friendship, that en- dured from that day until indeed death did them part. And as it later developed, these friends were instrumental in saving Stejneger's life.

Eighteen years later, Thomas Barbour, who became another of Dr. Stejneger's very close friends, travelled, as a youth of six- teen, to Washington to see him. Stejneger was by then Curator of the U. S. National Museum's collection of reptiles and batra- chians.

The impression that Dr. Stejneger made on Tom Barbour was a lasting one. Bar- bour ever afterward paid high tribute to the qualities that made Leonhard Stejneger an inspiring figure in American science. He "had that quality that erases the barrier of years and puts in its place a serene feel- ing of contemporaneity. This rare and sub- tle essence, which perforce must emanate, when it exists at all, from the elder of a pair of friends. Not to sacrifice the assur- ance that age justifies and still less show no trace of condescension and perhaps a will- ingness to listen generously, and forever to be patient, are the other great qualities

that bring about an easy companionship, one in which difference of age seems to vanish."

Just as Dr. Stejneger had impressed Tom Barbour at 16 and for life, 22 years later he so impressed another youth, a boy of fourteen had come to the National Museum to photograph some of the natural history exhibits with his first camera, one of those inexpensive little, black, cloth-covered boxes. In the "twenties" you had to have a permit to take a camera into the Museum. When this young man came to Dr. Stejneg- er's office to get it, Stejneger, aware of the limitations of the roll films of those days assured him that his only hope of success would be in making time exposures for which a tripod would be needed. With this advice he tendered his own tripod, and with it and that primitive little box camera the 14-year-old got a number of worth- while pictures. One in particular, taken of a Stegosaurus in the dinosaur hall, was made into a lantern slide and used for many years in zoology lectures by the late Dr. Z. P. Metcalf of North Carolina State, where this young man was a student in 1932. His name is Frank H. Johnson, for some years now Professor of Biology at Princeton University. He told me this story in 1953 when he was associated with the National Science Foundation and hap- pened to see the Egeli portrait of Stejneger hanging on my office wall. He, too, has never forgotten the great kindness shown him by Dr. Stejneger about 40 years ago. That Egeli painting, by the way, was pre- sented to the National Museum by a num- ber of Mr. Stejneger's admirers and associ- ates in celebration of his eighty-fifth birth- day.

Dr. Doris Cochran, now curator of the division of reptiles and batrachians to which Dr. Stejneger was appointed in 1899, came to the Museum as his assistant and

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artist in 1918. Above all, she remembers well his ". . . extraordinary powers of ap- plication to the problem, not only of the moment but for projects begun perhaps years before; his great gift for synthesizing facts to formulate zoologic concepts that have withstood every subsequent test; his retentive memory for books, and facts and personalities encountered in nearly three quarters of a century of research; his pa- tience in explaining the complexities of animal taxonomy to other students after he had with even greater patience un- tangled the facts and drawn the proper in- ferences from them himself...." She con- tinues that "he unfailingly found the weak link in a chain of scientific specious reason- ing and was equally quick in pointing out new and better applications of accepted rules . . . and spent hours of his time in going over manuscripts presented to him for criticism and was never known to shirk his responsibility in giving a full, fair sum- mary of his well considered opinions."

All of us who knew or worked for Stej- neger came to have the greatest respect and highest regard for this always kindly, unselfish, ever-helpful, even-tempered, sin- cere, and forthright man. With regard to Dr. Stejneger's even temper, Dr. Fisher al- ways said that as far back as he could re- member he never saw him in an angry mood, even when it would have been justi- fied. Dr. Stejneger was also a courageous individual, virile, active, and in his younger days a man of seemingly tireless energy, of exceptional vitality, and with remark- able recuperative powers-a man among men.

At least three times before he died, Feb- ruary 28, 1943, he narrowly escaped death, only to come away from each encounter more determined to carry on than before. On the most recent of these occasions he was struck by an automobile while cross- ing heavily travelled Constitution Avenue on his way to the Museum. Unconscious but not seriously injured, he was taken to the Emergency Hospital. The ensuing en- forced rest in his' seventy-first year seemed

to give him a new lease on life. He lived on to complete, at 85, his monumental 632- page life of Georg Wilhelm Steller, and continued at work each day until just a few weeks before the end at 92.

Dr. C. Hart Merriam gave a dramatic, first-hand account of the second of these three escapes at the dinner tendered Dr. Stejneger on his 86th birthday, in 1937, by 100 of his friends and associates. As the story went, Dr. Stejneger as the result of overwork had developed so serious a case of bronchial trouble that, on A. K. Fisher's recommendation as a physician, the Mu- seum authorities sent him to Arizona as much for his health as to assist C. Hart Merriam and Vernon Bailey with the bio- logical survey they were making in 1890 for the U. S. Department of Agriculture of the San Francisco Mountain-Grand Can- yon area. He arrived in such wretched condition that Dr. Merriam, who as you will recall was also a graduate physician, did not expect him to live long, but be- cause of Stejneger's condition, acceded to his importunings and determination to see the Grand Canyon at any cost before he died. It was a strenuous trip from Flag- staff by buckboard to the Canyon rim, where Merriam and Bailey carried him. He survived the trip, and before long was on the road to recovery, whether a result of the fresh air and sunshine, or the tlhrill of seeing the Grand Canyon, that he had been so anxious to behold, we shall never know. Though Stejneger was unable to take an active part in the actual desert survey, he did take notes and make colored sketches of the living animals that the others col- lected, and in the course of the next year he produced an annotated list of the rep- tiles and batrachians taken. Nevertheless, it was a "close shave' but perhaps not as close as his first one.

This was the most nearly fatal of Stej- neger's brushes with death. At Bering Is- land, in the summer of 1883, during his first Artic expedition, Stejneger tried pad- dling a native kayak. These frail-looking, slender, skin-covered native craft are like

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so much quick-silver in the hands of the inexperienced. No sooner had Stejneger been laced in, and pushed off, than the kayak, as is its wont, turned over. If you have seen the natives in action, or in the movies, you know that they, aided by their double-bladed paddles, can turn com- pletely over and almost at once be right side up again, but hapless Stejneger, unable to extricate himself, was hanging there head down in the icy waters contemplating the play of sunlight and shadow on the

bottom, resulting from the disturbance of the surface by the upset and his own strug- gles. His companions, fortunately, were able to haul the already unconscious Stej- neger onto the beach in time to revive him.

Dr. Stejneger was launched on this first of many Arctic expeditions by a fortuitous set of circumstances. He was young, ac- tive, knowledgeable, and experienced as a collector and field observer-a dedicated naturalist from Viking land. The Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Spencer F.

246 SYSTEMATIC ZOOLOGY

Baird, had- for some time been interested in the fauna of the Aleutian Island chain which, with the Russian-owned Com- mander Islands beyond, forms a natural series of stepping stones from Asia to America. Baird was particularly interested because Nordenskiold, on a voyage of the "Vega" following his northeast passage in 1879, had discovered on Bering Island skeletal material of the north Pacific man- atee or sea cow (Rhytina gigas), reputedly extinct since the middle of the eighteenth century and represented by only a few fragments in Moscow that had been brought back to the mainland by the orig- inal describer, Steller. (Hearsay had it that these remarkable mammals, in which the teeth were functionally replaced by dense, horny, ridged plates, reached a length of 30 feet and a weight of several thousand pounds!) Finally, in those days the very cooperative U. S. Signal Service was often in need of observers for their more out-of-the-way posts and frequently gave the opportunity of placing qualified natu- ralists in them. In the fall of 1881 they were looking for a man to occupy stations to be established on Bering Island and on the coast of Kamchatka.

That very year, in October, Dr. Stejneg- er, who was well acquainted with the Smithsonian secretary's still classic "Birds of North America" and his then standard "List of Birds," and who had named his first ornithological discovery, a northern shrike, Lanius bairdi, for Baird, came to Washington and called on Baird, seeking employment as a systematic zoologist.

Robert Ridgway, curator of the division of birds, was pleased to take him on as an assistant. It was when he was thus work- ing over a collection of West Indian birds that A. K. Fisher and C. H. Merriam first met Stejneger. On March 22, 1882, with only two days' notice, he hastily packed and left Washington for Bering Island and Kamchatka to establish the authorized Signal Service post. He proved to be the right man for the job on all counts-station organizer, weather observer, and field nat-

uralist. Not only did he visit Kamchatka twice while on this assignment, setting up a station there and training an observer for it, but he also was able to make what later proved to be invaluable studies of the fur seal rookeries on Copper and Bering is- lands, besides completing a 120-mile cir- cumnavigation of the latter. In all, he was absent from Washington just a few months short of two years, wintering on Bering Island. Indefatigable worker that he al- ways was he amassed an amazing collec- tion of specimens of all descriptions.

In his annual report for 1883 as Secre- tary of the Smithsonian Institution and Di- rector of the National Museum, Dr. Baird gives high praise to Dr. Stejneger for what he accomplished on the expedition: "The most noteworthy results . . . consisted first, of 4 more or less complete series of verte- brae and long bones and about 18 skulls of Rhytina; second, 1 skull of a bearded whale, and several skulls of three different genera of toothed whales, embracing forms of great rarity, and previously unknown in the North Pacific; third, three specimens of the Kamtschatkan mountain sheep; fourth, about 700 bird-skins, including 7 adults of the great Kamtschatkan sea-eagle, together with a large collection of birds of Kamtschatka and the Commander Islands, some of them new to science; fifth, collec- tions of fishes, marine invertebrates, etc. and, finally, sixth, collections of Tertiary fossils." Overlooked in this enumeration and enthusiastic appraisal of Stejneger's collections were the skeletal remains of the extinct Pallas' cormorant (Phalacrocorax perspicillatus), which he had discovered in a kitchen midden at the northern end of Bering Island while making his circuit of it.

Having won his spurs as an Arctic ex- plorer so auspiciously and having become as a result an authority on the previously little-known fur seal rookeries, Dr. Stej- neger thereafter was always the first man called upon to become a staff member of any fur seal investigation or international

FAMOUS ZOOLOGISTS 247

commission dealing with their exploitation and conservation.

In 1893, as special representative of the U. S. Fish Commission, Stejneger went again to Commander Islands, Bering and Copper, and Kamchatka, besides visiting St. Paul of the American fur seal islands in the Pribilofs. In 1896, as a member of the International Fur-Seal Commission, he gave considerable time to a rather com- plete survey of the conditions obtaining at that time in the Pribilof rookeries and those in the Commander Islands, including a call at Kamchatka and a stop at Robben Island before returning to the States by way of the Kuriles and Hakodate, Japan. The Pribilof Island fur seal rookeries were vis- ited by Stejneger for the last time in 1922, when he again had the opportunity to visit the Commander Islands, Kamchatka, and Robben Island.

For Stejneger, the highlight of this last of his expeditions to the North was a side trip to Kayak Island. He had wanted to visit it ever since he first set out for the Commander Islands in 1882, with a long- hand copy of the more significant passages in Steller's account of Bering's voyage of discovery of Alaska and the landing of Stel- ler on Kayak Island a full 180 years before. Stejneger later spoke reverently of the op- portunity he had had of treading the beach on which Steller had landed and of identi- fying the landmarks that he had described.

In 1894, Stejneger collected through the Bad Lands of South Dakota; and in 1900, in company with Charles W. Richmond, assistant curator of birds in the U. S. Na- tional Museum, he made extensive collec- tions in Puerto Rico and on Vieques, pri- marily for exhibit material for the Pan- American Exposition of 1901. Although they had expected to visit more of the Caribbean islands, they were forced by malarial attacks to return early. In 1904, with Gerrit S. Miller, assistant curator of mammals, with whom he had attended the Sixth International Zoological Congress, Dr. Stejneger made comprehensive collec- tions of vertebrates, terrestrial and acquatic

invertebrates, and plants in the Swiss, Ital- ian, and French alps; and in 1913 he made additional collections in these areas and in valleys in Italy and Austria that he had not previously visited. About a month in the summer of 1906 was spent making a field study of the life histories of Virginia sala- manders in the vicinity of Stribling Springs, Augusta County. Although the foregoing may cover Dr. Stejneger's greater and lesser field investigations, his trips to Eu- rope representing the Smithsonian Institu- tion at various International Congresses were no less important in furthering the interests of biological and zoological sci- ence. In all, Dr. Stejneger took part in eight International Congresses of Zoology, the fourth through the twelfth excepting the eighth. He served as delegate from the Smithsonian Institution at the Fourth In- ternational Ornithological Congress in Lon- don and the International Convention of the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature (1905), and the Sixth Interma- tional Congress of Entomology in Madrid (1935). In 1911, he was appointed Head Curator of Biology in the National Mu- seum, a position in which in 1932 he was granted life tenure by virtue of his accom- plishments and competence, by a dispensa- tion granted by President Herbert Hoover. He represented the Smithsonian Institu- tion at the 500th anniversary celebration of the founding of the University of St. An- drews, Scotland, and the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Fredrick Uni- versity at Christiania (now Oslo), Norway. The country of his birth conferred on him two high honors, Knight of the First Class, in 1906 from which he was elevated in 1939 to Commander of the Royal Nor- wegian order of St. Olav.

The names of the organizations and sci- entific societies of which he had been a member or in which he held office, often honorary, numbered more than twenty, the National Academy of Sciences, to which he was elected in 1923, perhaps heading the list.

A surprising number of Dr. Stejneger's

248 SYSTEMATIC ZOOLOGY

publications became landmarks in their re- spective fields. The man's breadth and depth of knowledge in more fields than he was especially interested in was astounding.

His several reports on his fur seal inves- tigations of the Russian and American is- lands will always be basic to any studies that may be undertaken on fur seals. His various "reviews" of families and genera of Japanese birds are all significant. The "Herpetology of Puerto Rico," which ap- peared in 1904, is perhaps the best paper of its kind for any major portion of the herpetological fauna of the Caribbean or New World tropics. Another of his im- portant contributions is the still sought- after "The Poisonous Snakes of North America." Whatever Stejneger did he did so well that its value never lessened but grew with the years. With Thomas Bar- bour, he completed before his death five editions of that indispensible herpetological tool, the "Check-list of North American Amphibians and Reptiles."

Of the 411 of Dr. Stejneger's papers, large and small, that appeared in print be- fore he died, 152 dealt with herpetological matters: taxonomy, nomenclature, zoo- geography, anatomy, economy, evolution, several translations, some reviews of ger- mane titles, and several obituaries of spe- cialists. His 146 ornithological contribu- tions, which cover most phases of the study of birds, as with the publications on reptiles and batrachians, dealt with spe- cies and collections from many parts of the world. More than a dozen of his pub- lished papers concerned mammals. One less specialized title, to be commended to all systematic workers, is "A Chapter in the History of Zoological Nomenclature" (Smithsonian Misc. Coll., vol. 77, no. 1, 1924).

Not the last and certainly not the least of Dr. Stejneger's writings was his mag- num opus, "Georg Wilhelm Steller." One does not have to read between the lines to get the feeling that this was the joy and pride of his later life. The dedication of the volume reads, "In the memory of

Spencer Fullerton Baird, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who sent me on the mission which eventually resulted in this book." From the time the 30-year- young Stejneger went as a meteorologist for the U. S. Signal Service to the Com- mander Islands and for the Smithsonian as a collector, writing this life of Steller had been, perhaps subconsciously in the earlier days, his supreme ambition. The work is a masterpiece of biographical research-50 long years of it. Not only did Dr. Stejneger uncover much previously unknown infor- mation regarding the early life of Steller, but he personally visited, so far as prac- ticable, the scenes of Steller's scientific dis- coveries and Arctic adventures, and almost lost his life so doing.

Dr. Cochran tells me that he was over eighty when he set himself the task of learning Polish in order to translate for his own satisfaction some old records of Ber- ing's and Steller's travels published in that language. Polish thus seems to have been one of the few European languages that he did not know well.

Having recently read through Edward Lurie's life of "Louis Agassiz," I was struck by the similarity of the pattern of his early life and that of Leonhard Stejneger's, 44 years later. Louis entered the College de Bienne at the age of 10, Leonhard the Bergen Latin School at the very same age. Both seem to have had a thorough ground- ing in the classical languages. We read that "Agassiz was attracted to the study of languages, especially Greek, Latin, Ger- man, and Italian. Showing marked pro- ficiency, he became multi-ingual... The same was unquestionably true of Stejneger, as we have seen. This profi- ciency stood both in good stead throughout life. In large measure because he was an accomplished linguist, Stejneger became a leading figure in the many International Congresses of Zoology he attended and a tower of strength in the stabilization of zoological nomenclature. "Louis' vacations at home were spent adding to collections of insects, birds, fish and small land ani-

FAMOUS ZOOLOGISTS 249

mals." Stejneger's interest in zoology also developed in his boyhood. At 16 he was keeping notes on Norwegian birds, which were illustrated by rather beautifully done pen and ink sketches of most of the birds recorded, colored by himself, an early in- dication of his skill as a draughtsman and artist in water color and oil. Seeing the still extant sketches and drawings of birds and animals and some of the landscapes and cartoons he did of life, animal and human, in the Arctic, one can well believe that he would have had an equally suc- cessful career as an artist.

Both young men had been destined for business careers, Stejneger in his father's mercantile establishment, Agassiz with his "Uncle Mayer." Both took up the study of medicine due to family importunings, Stej- neger because it was his ailing mother's wish, Agassiz because of parental insist- ence. Agassiz did eventually graduate in medicine, though Stejneger did not (but did later in law); but the botany and zo- ology given as a part of every physician's education appealed to both of them. Both men produced outstanding systematic zo- ological monographs and numerous smaller papers and loved travel, exploration, and collecting. Both were dedicated museum men. In later life their paths diverged somewhat; the means of attaining their

goals became different but were directed toward the same end, to make great the museums to which they were devoted. Both men refused a number of attractive offers elsewhere in similar institutions to remain with one whose future they pre- ferred to share. Agassiz went on to promote and build a great museum, The Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and Stejneger to add to the renown and scienti- fic prestige of another great museum, The United States National Museum in Wash- ington.

All that is good of a man may be said of Dr. Leonhard Stejneger. He had a per- sonality that left an impression on you. He was a clear, incisive thinker, writer, and speaker, calm, collected, yet purposeful, understanding, and of judicial tempera- ment.

In the Smithsonian archives is a pencilled draft of an old Cold Spring Harbor Eugen- ics Record Office form that he had com- pleted. In an answer to one question about his character and favorite studies and pur- suits he gave in five Latin words a clhar- acteristic picture of himself, his life and his philosophy: Nil humanum a me ali- cuum (Nothing human, to me, is alien).

WALDO L. SCHMITT is an Honorary Re- search Associate of the United States National Museum, Washington, D. C.