Edward Bles was a zoologist with a substantial private income. He did not need to work but did so anyway, eventually in his own private laboratory. As described in Part 1 he was the first to describe the development of Xenopus in detail. Indeed much of his his work was in embryology at a time when this field was a leading and often controversial aspect of zoological research. Confusing for genealogists, he was known as Edward Jeremiah Bles but his birth was registered as Jeremiah Edward. Therefore, some documents do not fall immediately to hand when searching the historical records.
Bles was born in Salford near Manchester in 1864, the son of Abraham Jeremiah Samuel Bles (1838-1909) and Esther Polak. Abraham and his brother, David Samuel, were born in The Hague; their father established S.D. Bles & Co, merchants and shippers, in Machester largely for the Dutch trade. The Bles’s were leading lights in the Jewish community in Manchester as well as looking after the interests of the Dutch. Abraham was Dutch Consul.
In 1876 the Manchester Courier reported that young Bles had passed the Government Science Examination. Aged 14, Edward Bles was sent to a school in Hanover and at 18 started work in the family business. An interest in science which developed at school in Germany led to his joining the Manchester Microscopical Society (still in existence) of which he became Secretary. Such clubs brought amateurs and professionals together and it was there that Bles fell under the influence of Arthur Milnes Marshall FRS (1852-1893) who, in 1879 at the age of 27 had been appointed to the new chair of zoology in Owens College (later incorporated into what is now the University of Manchester). Bles therefore became a student at the college. In 1890 Bles published with Marshall papers on the development of amphibians, in this case the kidneys and fat bodies, and the blood vessels.
From Owens College, he moved to King’s College, London, graduating with a B.Sc in 1890. His obituarist (see below) noted that he spent time at the Naples marine laboratory but returned to Manchester, as junior demonstrator in zoology. In the summer of 1892 he was working at the Plymouth laboratory of the Marine Biological Association on plankton. He is shown in the resulting paper as honorary research fellow at Owens College. Bles must have been well known in the Plymouth laboratory because he was appointed Director in April 1893. But this was at a time of financial stringency. The Director had a heavy administrative load which prevented personal research. These factors resulted in a rapid turnover of Directors. Bles left in 1894. However, there may have been other reasons. In his second report as Director he noted that the issue of the Association’s journal was late: ‘Unforeseen circumstances affecting myself have caused a further postponement’. Were these ‘unforeseen circumstances’ and leaving Plymouth related to illness, which dogged him in later years, or to the fact that he married Bertha Bachmann of Augsberg in Dusseldorf, Germany on 12 November 1893?
October 1896 saw him admitted to King’s College, Cambridge at the age of 32. He graduated B.A. (as a research degree—the Ph.D, ‘the German degree’ was not awarded in Cambridge until 1921) in 1898 (M.A. 1907). In 1902 John Graham Kerr left Cambridge to the chair of natural history in Glasgow taking Bles (and his frogs) with him as senior assistant, which would be the equivalent of senior lecturer in English universities.
After 5 years in Glasgow, by which time he had been awarded the D.Sc. degree (by the University of London in 1906) and elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1904, Bles moved out of academia. First he moved to the Hill House, Iffley, Oxford and then to Cambridge where he and Bertha lived at ‘Elterholm’, 12 Madingley Road—a very large house. It would appear it was there that he further equipped his laboratory and ‘started to breed various species of rare amphibia, a difficult enterprise in which he had the assistance of his devoted wife’.
By that time he was also working on Arcella, a freshwater protozoan, in particular the role and control of the gas vacuoles which regulate its buoyancy. Bles had a marked determination not to rush into print. Although he had virtually completed the work by 1914, his long paper was not published until after his ‘very sudden’ death on 3 May 1926. Bertha, who died in 1960, had again helped Bles with is research and she helped with publication. Over the years it has been widely cited. He had again commissioned Kirkpatrick Maxwell to draw the plates.
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| One of the plates from Bles's paper on Arcella which was published three years aftere hisa death |
Here is Bles’s words is a description of a part of this work:
These uniformly positive results strongly support the view, which has long been held, that the function of the gas-vacuoles is to reduce the specific gravity of the Arcella, and float it up to the surface which is rich in dissolved oxygen. But it is now possible to go a step farther. In considering the natural causes, or changes in the environment, which might possibly stimulate gas formation for hydrostatic purposes in Arcella, the first consideration was, what is the most obvious and most important physiological difference between the water at the bottom and the water under the surface-film? This is clearly a difference in oxygen pressure. The analyses of pond-water for the determination of dissolved gases carried out by Knauthe (1898, 1899) and Zuntz (1900) show that pond-water may, by the influence of physical and biological conditions, be entirely deprived of oxygen. Owing to the slow rate of diffusion of oxygen in water, the bottom water of a pond or ditch, exhausted of oxygen, will be replenished only a long time after the surface layers. Hence it will clearly benefit those aerobic or semi-anaerobic organisms which live on the bottom, to have a means of escape which will rapidly carry them from a level of oxygen depletion to a level of oxygen plenty. The principal stimulus to form gas-vacuoles in Arcella and similar organisms which live at the bottom of ponds and ditches, is lack of oxygen. There may be, and probably are, other sets of external conditions which stimulate the production of gas by these organisms, and there are also conditions arising within the cell which stimulate the gas-forming structures. These will be described and discussed later…
It is evident that in Cambridge Bles was well known and respected. Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861-1947) wrote Bles’s obituary for Nature while he and David Keilin (1887-1963) completed the Arcella paper, the biochemical aspects of which fell into their own interests in cell metabolism.
Hopkins began the obituary in Nature:
By the recent death of Edward J. Bles, zoological science has lost a devoted worker whose qualities of mind and character were of the highest. It is the faith of many of his friends that, but for factors of temperament, and health, he would have become a leader of thought in the subject of his choice. His publications, though of high merit, were relatively few; but his intimates know that they were far from representing all that he accomplished, and are aware of the temperamental restraints but for which he could and would have published much more. He was one of those investigators-deserving sympathy from colleagues with easier standards—who would fain allow publication to wait for perfection, and yet realise even better than others that perfection never arrives. In spite of such inhibitions, or perhaps because of them, his published output is of high value and stamped with the quality of absolute reliability. For elementary teaching, or, at any rate, for the shackles of departmental teaching and organisation, Bles had some distaste. On the other hand, he was the ideal colleague and one of the most educative influences for the young research worker…
He ended:
Bles was not merely a scholarly biologist in a very wide sense, he was also a man of fine general culture; music, literature, and the arts all made a vivid appeal to him. He had, moreover, a true sense of values and a very beautiful appreciation of the relative importance of things. His knowledge was of the widest, but so philosophic was the cast of his mind that synthetic thought was essential to him. He endeavoured always to see things as a whole.
I have tried to draw up a list of Bles’s publications; it is shown below.
Bles’s legacy extends beyond his publications. He left the entire residue of his estate (about £44,000) plus his equipment and books to the University of Cambridge. It is difficult to equate the worth of that amount of money to today’s economy but in terms of income value (using GDP/capita as the index) it represents £13 million. Over the years, the Bles Fund has funded the Charles Darwin Chair of Animal Embryology—Bles’s express wish as was its use for ‘the promotion and furtherance of biology as a pure science’.
I have been unable to find a photograph of Edward Bles.
In the final part of this series I will return to Bles’s interest in amphibians and how he came to have a walk-on part in the Kammerer controversy.
Hopkins FG. 1926. Dr Edward J. Bles. Nature 118, 90-91.
Publication by Edward J. Bles (Jeremiah Edward Bles):
Bles EJ. 1884. The remarkable sunsets. Nature 29, 427-428.
Marshall AM, Bles EJ. 1890. The Development of the Kidneys and Fat Bodies in the Frog. Studies from the Biological Laboratories of Owens College 2,133-158 plus 1 plate.
Marshall AM, Bles EJ. 1890. The Development of the Blood-Vessels in the Frog. Studies from the Biological Laboratories of Owens College 2,185-268 plus 3 plates.
Bles EJ. 1892. Notes on the plankton observed at Plymouth during June, July, August and September 1892. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 2, 340-343.
Bles EJ. 1893. Director’s Report,—No. I. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 3, ix-x.
Bles EJ. 1894. Director’s Report,—No. II. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 3, xvii-xx.
Bles EJ. 1898. The correlated distribution of abdominal pores and nephrostomes in fishes. Journal of Anatomy and Physiology 32, 484-512.
Bles EJ. 1898. On the openings in the wall of the body-cavity of vertebrates. Proceedings of the Royal Society 62, 232-247.
Bles EJ. 1901. On the breeding habits of Xenopus laevis Daud. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 11, 220-222.
Bles EJ. 1905. The life-history of Xenopus laevis Daud. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 41, 789-821.
Bles EJ. 1905. Notes on the development of Phyllomedusa hypochondrialis. Report of the 74th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1904, pp 605-606.
Bles EJ. 1905. Bles E J On the hatching of anuran tadpoles and the function…[incomplete]. 6th International Congress of Zoology, Bern 1904. (Compte-rendu des séances du sixième Congrès international de zoologie, tenu à Berne du 14 au 16 août 1904[no further details]
Bles EJ. 1906. The life-history of Xenopus laevis Daud. DSc Thesis, University of London.
Bles EJ. 1907. Notes on anuran development: Paludicola, Hemisus and Phyllomedusa. In The Work of John Samuel Budgett, Balfour Student of the University of Cambridge. Edited by J. Graham Kerr, pp 443-458 plus 6 plates. Cambridge University Press.
Bles, EJ. 1929. Arcella. a study in cell physiology. Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 72, 527-648.
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