Willoughby Lowe (1872-1949). Collector of specimens for the Natural History Museum in London. Part One: Early Life in England and Farming in Colorado

In previous articles (here) I have touched on the life of Willoughby Lowe (1872-1949), a highly-praised collector in many parts of the world for the Natural History Museum in London as well as all-round naturalist. In birds alone he added over 10,000 specimens to the Museum in an era characterised by description of external features, the discovery of new species and their geographical range. Lowe wrote two books on the various expeditions of which he had been part and there are summaries available online what he did and where he went. However there is little of his life and background. In an endeavour to provide a fuller picture of Lowe I have scoured family trees (often inaccurate or incomplete), original material available on genealogy websites (again thanks to clerical errors sometimes inaccurate) and the like. There are still important gaps and I hope readers will contact me if they have more information. To make that job more manageable, I am splitting Lowe’s life into parts. This first part covers his life from 1872 until 1907, including the first chapter of The Trail that is Always New.

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The Reverend Edward Jackson Lowe (1825-1893) had ten children, eight by his first wife, Mary Wainwright (1840-1880), and two by his second, Elizabeth Sutcliffe (1851-1929). Willoughby Prescott Lowe was the seventh, born on 10 December 1872 at Tylers Green in Buckinghamshire where his father was vicar. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Great Gonerby, Lincolnshire but then, in 1880, to the vicarage of Stallingborough also in Lincolnshire.

The village of Stallingborough is on the coast at the point the Humber estuary reaches the North Sea. As such it offered a variety of habitats and places to explore, as Willoughby explained:

Many were the happy days spent in this delightful hunting-ground in company with my brothers—watching birds and animals, shooting, trapping and bird's-nesting. We had free access to all the surrounding country even down to the banks of the Humber. All my pocket-money went in powder and shot, taxidermist's materials and books on the subject, also occasionally in having a specimen well mounted by a professional.

Realising his son’s interest in natural history, Willoughby Lowe’s father arranged an interview at the Natural History Museum in London with its director, William Henry Flower. Flower told him that such work was very poorly paid and would probably grow out of his great interest. Flower was wrong on the latter point. No doubt disappointed by the advice from London, the 16-year old asked his father if he could join another brother in going to work with yet another brother ‘living in the wilds of Colorado’. The answer was ‘yes’:

It exceeded my wildest hope, to think that I should soon be crossing the Atlantic with the anticipation of seeing birds and animals of the New World, together with the excitement of buying a double-barrelled gun and getting the necessary equipment! Finally the auspicious day arrived in April 1888 when we left for Liverpool, spending the night at the London and North Western Hotel, and the following morning we embarked on the Cunarder Servia. That first voyage will always remain fixed in my memory, with the thrill of seeing swarms of gulls and other sea-birds following the ship, also my first acquaintance with petrels and shearwaters, and how I wished to possess some!

Lowe recalled that RMS Servia used sail and steam during the crossing of approximately 10 days to New York. The Lowe brothers travelled on a historically important vessel. Clyde-built, Servia was the first liner to be built of steel, the first liner specifically designed for passengers and one of the first to be equipped with electric lighting albeit only for the public and engine rooms.

RMS Servia

From his book and further searches, I deduced that the brother already in Colorado was his eldest, Wainwright Edward Lowe born in 1862. Searches showed that he had first entered the USA in 1881, having been described in the England Census of earlier that year as a medical student. He became a US citizen in 1891 and thus in 1920 had to obtain a US Passport for travel. His address then was Beulah Star Route, Pueblo, which, as can be deduced from Willoughby’s account, is south-west of Pueblo. He was a sheep farmer and stock rancher. Wainwright Lowe was described as a ‘stockman’ when he crossed the Atlantic in 1928. It seems that it was then or shortly after that he and his wife returned to UK, living in Kent. A newspaper report from 1933 shows that he and his wife were living at a house in Fitzroy Road, Tankerton, Whitstable (a servant aged 17 confessed to stealing money). Wainwright Edward Lowe died in 1934.

The brother ‘H’ with whom Willoughby travelled can only have been Horace Gordon Lowe (1868-1948). Although Horace had matriculated at Oxford in 1887, his voyage to Colorado in April 1888 and lack of a degree would suggest he, like his elder brother Wainwright, also dropped out (a term not then in use) of university. I do not know when he returned from Colorado but by 1889 he was at theological college. Thus, like two of his brothers, he was ordained in the Church of England. He died in Torquay, Devon, in 1948.

Willoughby and Horace travelled by rail past Niagara Falls and via Chicago and Denver to Pueblo. After a night at the Victoria Hotel the two brothers decided to walk the 18 miles to their elder brother’s shanty in the cool of the evening. That took longer than expected and they arrived after dark and very thirsty. They had arrived in what really was the Wild West to sleep on sheepskins and to furnishings comprising a table, three chairs and a washing bowl.

I have not been able to work out in what capacity Wainwright Lowe was working but I suspect he had some title to the land. They kept both sheep (perhaps mainly) and cattle cared for over a wide area by herders of Mexican descent. They moved sheep to the Wet Mountains of Huerfano County for the summer defending their flocks of sheep from coyote, lynx and puma (mountain lion) raids at night. Willoughby had begun observing  and collecting birds and mammals virtually upon arrival and the birds of the Wet Mountains were the subject of a paper in The Auk that was published in 1894.

The winters were brutally cold with heavy snow falls lasting for days.

After two years Willoughby Lowe returned to England for six months. Indeed, at the 1891 Census he was back home, living in the vicarage at Stallingborough with his father, step-mother, brother, and two half-siblings. 

As well as accounts of the landscapes, weather, plants and animals encountered during travels with the sheep to the mountain pastures (including correct deductions about olfaction in birds), Lowe’s chapter offers a great deal of information on what life as a farmer and traveler entailed in the late 1800s.

Lowe and a Navajo employed as a sheep ‘herder’ went by train to New Mexico since sheep were cheaper there than in Colorado. He bought 2000 to shepherd back to Colorado in what proved to be a highly unpleasant journey, with torrential rain for days on end, at one point a pack of 300  wolves, and a skunk at which he took a pot shot and received the consequences which made sleep impossible. He continued:

Our route lay through cattle country in places, and there is always great enmity between cattlemen and sheepmen, the reason being that wherever sheep go cattle will not feed. We were warned by cowboys that if we attempted to pass through this country they would shoot us. At all events we took the risk, travelling as fast as we could by night to avoid being seen….

…Most people had but one idea, namely, how to turn a dollar, and so long as you turned it successfully, you were a "smart" man! In the West there was one other factor that counted, and that was the man who got the first pull with his six-shooter. Personally, I have never in all my life carried a revolver; I hate them…I have never carried a six-shooter and never wanted one. If I had an occasion to shoot, I had something better, a rifle and a shot-gun, which are carried openly and always command respect.

And just as a reminder that fiddling with tariffs by US presidents is not a new phenomenon:

The fiscal policy of America does not often change very greatly, but on one occasion I remember that it did and to our cost, the tariffs being suddenly reduced when President Grover Cleveland came into power. We had just previously bought a quantity of sheep, and the price in forty-eight hours went down by 50 per cent’, spelling ruin to the Western ranchers.

In the chapter Lowe noted:

I was married in 1895, and now left my brother’s house for one of my own on the Charles River. The red sandstone house was situated on the edge of a beautiful rocky cañon, down which the river flowed and on either side pine trees grew in profusion.

Annie and the Seals family

Willoughby Lowe married Annie Seals on 23 December 1895 in Seward, Nebraska. He was 23; she was 19. Annie was the daughter of John Seals, an English sea captain who had retired to Nebraska.

John Seals was born on 18 February 1833 in at Cheshire, the son of a Wesleyan minister. He worked his way up the merchant navy, obtaining his master’s ticket at the age of 27. In 1860 he married Sarah Allwood who died, aged 37, on 1 February 1873 at Firgrove, Sealand, Cheshire. Within a few months he married Annie Roberts, also of Sealand—Annie Seals’s mother. Annie was born on 13 October 1876 but at Saughall, also in Cheshire, her mother died on 27 October, one would guess from the timing, of child-bed fever.

Newspaper articles reporting John Seals’s death at home in Seward on 17 December 1896—a year after his daughter’s marriage—outlined his move to live in the USA. 

He finally abandoned the sea, and while on a visit to the Messrs. Cattle was induced to make this bis home. He purchased a fine farm just northwest of the city of Seward, on which he had built a fine residence, where he has resided for the past thirteen years [i.e. since 1892].

and:

He was a retired sea captain, and owned a fine farm and home one mile northwest of Seward. He was a genial, pleasant gentleman, and made many friends during his several years residence here. He was married about two months ago to Miss Anna E. Ivey late of England. His daughter, Mrs. W. P. Lowe of Pueblo, Colo., arrived here several days before His death.

A census in 1885 showed that Annie was with him and that he was employing two farm hands plus the wife of one of them as housekeeper. 

Where they were before his second wife’s death in 1876 and life in Nebraska I do not know. He may have been at sea but there is no trace of young Annie in the 1881 census of England.

It is tempting to speculate that John Seals met his third—and very unfortunate—wife, Anna Eliza Ivey, on a trip to UK. We can trace John and Annie arriving at Liverpool from Montreal in June 1892 on the Allan Line’s SS Mongolian. Anna Eliza Ivey from Berkshire (born 1950) was, in 1881, a governess while by 1891 living ‘on her own means’ with a boarder and servant in North Street, Reading. The rapidly widowed Mrs Seals moved to the Los Angeles area of California where in February 1898 she married another Englishman, Samuel Eliott who was born in Liskeard, Cornwall in 1852, a landscape gardener who had lived in the USA since 1892. Widowed again sometime between 1910 and 1029, Anna died in Los Angeles on 29 December 1947, aged 97.

Discovering who Annie Seals was and where she came from is not helped by the errors in her marriage certificate. There she is shown as ‘Anna’ while her mother is down as ‘Sarah’ Roberts instead of Annie.

It is now obvious that Willoughby Lowe and Annie Seals met in Seward, Nebraska in 1893 or 1894, thanks to his acceptance of a glass of water in the Huerfano Valley. He had ridden over to see how their sheep were doing during their summer sojourn grazing in the mountains he found the man tending them was ill and had to return home. Lowe then rode 15 miles to the valley in order to engage another.

As I approached a Mexican's house, his wife saw me, rushed in and shut the door; but in answer to my repeated knocking she came out and enquired what I wanted, becoming more tractable when she found I could speak her language. Unfortunately her husband, who was a herder, had gone away. She then told me what misfortune had befallen her. Sickness had carried off nearly all her family, and she asked me if I would go in and see two of her children who were on the point of death; she also showed me another child who had died during the night. It was a pitiable sight, and after trying to console her I rode away to another house, where I found a man. But unfortunately for me before leaving I drank a glass of water, little suspecting what dire results would follow, as no doubt it contained the germs which gave me typhoid fever…

He then set off for home but first his horse got stuck in quicksand and was freed by great exertion, then he was caught ‘in a terrible rain-storm which was so heavy there were large lakes of water on the prairies,. The next day he shot water-fowl and stayed up late into the night to preserve them. The day after that he was very ill. He was taken to the doctor in Pueblo who immediately recognised a case of typhoid. He spent ‘many months’ in the hospital run by the Irish Sisters of Charity ‘to whose devoted attention and skill in nursing I certainly owe my life’. After returning to the ranch:

…an invitation came from a relative asking me to stay with him and recuperate my health in Nebraska; thereupon I packed up and left Seward, a small town in the midst of rolling prairie farms…

Not long after returning to Pueblo he was back in hospital—this time for a broken arm caused by a cottontail spooking a horse and dragging the other horse and a new wagon over precipitous rocks.

Having looked at the family trees I then realised that the relative of Willoughby’s in Seward, Nebraska was John Seals. John Seals’s mother was Sarah Lowe, the sister of Willoughby’s grandfather. Annie Seals and Willoughby Lowe were second cousins.

A Daughter, A Gun Accident, Cattle and Home

Annie and Willoughby’s daughter, Annie Charlotte Mary Willoughby Lowe was born in Pueblo on 20 September 1896.

In his chapter on life in Colorado he recalled:

On 3rd March 1897 I narrowly escaped a serious accident. I had two guns, a double barrelled breech-loader and a twelve bore muzzle-loader. I foolishly did not realise that old guns will not fire modern smokeless powder. The old muzzle-loader was kept ready charged, and upon looking out of the window I saw a partially albino Junco, or Snow-bird, as it is commonly called. I was anxious to have this as a specimen, so I seized the old gun, walked out in the snow and fired. A terrific explosion followed. The right barrel broke away an inch below the nipple, and the left barrel also exploded half way down. Both barrels were torn apart and blown in different directions; the fore-end and locks, together with the grip on the handle of the stock, were splintered and blown to fragments. I was knocked backwards, and a piece of metal struck my nose and broke it, whilst my face and hands were powder burnt and pierced with tiny fragments of splintered wood. My wife set my nose, having great difficulty in stopping the haemorrhage. We were twenty-five miles from the nearest doctor, and entirely alone; it was intensely cold weather with deep snow on the ground, so there was nothing to be done but to wait a few days until I had recovered from the shock. When she drove me to the hospital, the doctor declared that he could not have set my nose better, and that I was uncommonly lucky to be alive! It is difficult to realise how a thing of this kind affects one's nerves. It was months before I could fire a gun again…

The account reads as if he was more concerned with cattle on ‘the ranch’ (his, his brother’s or somebody else’s?) in these later years in Colorado, describing; patrolling the 16-mile perimeter fence each day, round-ups, branding and the devastating effect of lightning on cattle standing near barbed-wire fences. A horse he was riding was killed by a charging cow. Rattlesnakes were common.

But then he finished his chapter with:

In 1897 we decided to leave Colorado and return to England. I had spent nine years in the West, and had had varied experiences when I was young enough to enjoy them to the full. The wonderful scenery with the crimson sun dipping nightly over the Rockies, when all was silent but for the howl of some coyote and the incessant chorus of chirping crickets, the whole sky a canopy of gold, throwing a reflected glow on the vast prairies; in the winter the range of mountains appearing very blue and white like some great ice-berg, and with the sun guarded by two " sun dogs," 1 proclaiming worse weather to come; also the rarefied atmosphere and refraction of light making great distances seem near, and occasionally a beautiful mirage appearing on the desolate plains; these scenes with a charm of their own leave many pleasant memories of one's early days in the Far West. I hear that all this open country is now fenced in, and the Ford car has come into possession! I am afraid the younger generation will have to seek fresh fields for their adventures and excitements in a land of unspoilt Nature.

The Lowes disembarked from Cunard’s RMS Campania (converted into an aircraft carrier during the First World War) in Liverpool on 22 October 1897 from New York. Willoughby’s occupation in the passenger list is described as ‘none’. Thereafter, their whereabouts are unclear apart from glimpses provided by official records. Their first son, Prescott Willoughby Cecil Seals Lowe, was born on 9 April 1898 in Colwyn Bay, Wales. The boy was then christened by his uncle, George Lincoln Gambier Lowe on 19 June 1898 at Throwleigh a Dartmoor village in Devon where George was Rector. Throwleigh as will become evident was to play a large part in the life of Willoughby Lowe and his family.

Willoughby Lowe was not done with North America. He, his wife and children sailed for Montreal from Liverpool on board the Allan Line’s SS Parisian in September 1990. I have been unable to find the reason for this trip or of when they returned to UK. They cannot be found in the 1901 Census in Britain, suggesting they were still abroad. However by 1903 they can be found living in Throwleigh.

The Agatha Christie Connexion

Willoughby and Annie Lowe’s house in Throwleigh, Gorsemoor, has attracted attention because it appeared in an Agatha Christie novel, The Sittaford Mystery. The website, Agatha Christie Wiki, has the following:

In the book, Captain Trevelyn had built himself a comfortable dwelling Sittaford House and then "as a speculation, he had built six small bungalows, each in its quarter acre of ground, along the lane." This description closely matches that of "Gorsemoor House" at Throwleigh. Gorsemoor House (coordinates 50.6979952, -3.8945263) is located along Shilstone Lane and sits in the shadow of Cosdon Hill. It was built by a wealthy local resident Willoughby Lowe. He also built a number of granite bungalows adjacent to his property along Shilstone Lane. In fact a look at an Ordnance Survey map of the area will show neat parcels of land with small bungalows on Shilstone Lane on the edge of Gorsemoor House. There are actually seven such parcels today but perhaps only 6 in Christie's time.

According to the Throwleigh Archives, there is a strong local tradition that Agatha Christie stayed at Gorsemoor House herself and did some writing there.

Christie and her sister Madge also bought a bungalow at Throwleigh for their brother Monty in the 1920s. This bungalow, according to the Throwleigh Archives, is "Crossways", one of the granite bungalows along Shilstone Lane. 

Occupation and Catholicism

I can only assume that Willoughby Lowe and/or Annie had by the first decade of the 20th century means sufficient to live the life of the country gentleman—a far cry for his avoidance of working for the Natural History Museum in London because of the poor pay. In later decades there is evidence from newspaper advertisements that he was farming the surrounding land.

With a father and three brothers as Church of England clergy, Willoughby Lowe and his then two children were baptised as Catholics at Okehampton, the nearest town to Throwleigh, in 1904. Thereafter, newspaper reports indicate the Lowes played a major role in the church in Devon.

The Western Times of 30 March 1906:

Roman Catholics of the neighbourhood have decided on providing a church in Okehampton in which members of their body may worship. Hitherto services have been held in a room et the house of Mr. Mudge, but a movement, In which Mr. Willoughby Lowe, of Throwleigh, has taken a prominent part, was set on foot, which resulted in a contract being placed with Messrs. Geen, Son and Co., of Okehampton, to erect an iron church on a site in Station-road. The building will be made partly of wood, ornamented with a spire, and will be 60 feet long and 24 feet in width. It has to be completed in six weeks, and when opened it will be in charge of the Rev. Dr. Burns, from St. Boniface College, Plymouth.

I wonder whether this devotion is the reason for Martin Hinton’s comment in his Foreword to Lowe’s second book (The End of the Trail, 1947): ‘In matters of faith Mr. Willoughby Lowe and I are probably poles apart. But we are both naturalists…’

To the Philippines

Ten years after he left Colorado to return to England, Willoughby Lowe set off for the Philippines. In many ways his experiences of living and surviving in the Wild West while collecting specimens had set him up as the ideal, hard-working and tough field naturalist that natural history at the time demanded. He was 35 and his career as a collector-naturalist was just beginning in earnest.

It was the Philippines that established his reputation and that trip will be the subject of Part Two of this series.

Lowe WP. 1894. A list of the birds of the Wet Mountains, Huerfano County, Colorado. Auk 11, 266-270

Golden-cheeked Woodpecker—spotted in Mexico

 

We saw several Golden-cheeked Woodpeckers (Melanerpes chrysogenys) while we were in Mexico in February. This one is a male and was photographed near San Blas.

Like the Black-throated Magpie-Jay we also saw in the same part of western Mexico, it was named by Nicholas Vigors from a specimen collected by the expedition led by Frederick William Beechey (1796-1856) on board HMS Blossom. I have no doubt their bird was shot during the ship’s short stay in San Blas in December 1827.

A Mexico endemic, the Golden-cheeked Woodpecker occurs in woodland on the Pacific side of the country. Considered common and widespread within its range, it was greeted with delight as a ‘cracking woodpecker’.

Vigors NA, 1839. Ornithology. pp. 13–40. In: Richardson J, Vigors NA, Lay GT, Bennett ET, Owen R, Gray JE, Buckland W,  Sowerby GB. The Zoology of Captain Beechey’s Voyage; compiled from the collections and notes made by Captain Beechey, the officers and naturalist of the expedition, during a voyage to the Pacific and Behring’s Straits performed in His Majesty’s Ship Blossom, under the command of Captain F.W. Beechey, R.N., F.R.S. &c &c in the years 1825, 26, 27 and 28: i–xii, 1–180. London.

Snakes, Drugs and Rock ’N’ Roll. My Early Years. Romulus Whitaker with Janaki Lenin. HarperCollins, India. 2024

 

I first heard of Rom Whitaker in the late 1970s. He was in process of becoming established as the mover and shaker in the study and conservation of reptiles in India. This book is a frank account of his early life and of how, born in New York in 1943, he first went with his family to India where he was schooled, returned to the USA as a snake-mad youth, served in the US Army as a medical lab technician, sailed the world as a merchant seaman to make money (of which he was always short) and then moved back to India.

The title of the book, Snakes, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll. My Early Years, saves everything you need to know about the book before pressing the ‘buy now’ button. Importantly, it describes the exploits of reptile-mad young men and women in the light of what constituted amateur and commercial herpetology in the USA in the decades towards the latter half of the 20th century.

Black-throated Magpie-Jay in Mexico—Surgeon Collie’s Bird of HMS Blossom

 

We spotted this Black-throated Magpie-Jay (Cyanocorax colliei) in the late afternoon in Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific Coast of Mexico in February. It was one of a small group that sat long enough for a photograph. I had to pinch myself in order to remind me which continent I was on since this bird resembles in flight, jizz and general coloration the Red-billed Blue Magpie (Urocissa erythroryncha) found in Hong Kong. It was good that we also saw this species further up the coast near the town of San Blas from where the original specimen was sent to London.

Alexander Collie

Educated in Edinburgh and London, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Alexander Collie (1793-1835) was the ship’s surgeon on board HMS Blossom, a ship specially fitted out for exploration of arctic waters. Blossom (1806-1848) was commanded by Frederick William Beechey (1796-1856), a future rear-admiral, Fellow of the Royal Society and President of the Royal Geographical Society. His job was to explore the north-west Pacific, particularly the Bering Strait, in the hope of finding a Northwest Passage to the Atlantic. The famous expedition took nearly three years from 1825. The naturalist on board was not Collie, as I have seen stated, but George Tradescant Lay (c1800-1845).

HMS Blossom reached San Blas, 100 miles north of Puerto Vallarta, on the way back from the north on 20 December 1827. I have read that ships of the Royal Navy often used San Blas as a victualling stop when operating in the eastern Pacific.

Nicholas Vigors

Back in London, Nicholas Aylward Vigors (1785-1840) described the ornithological results in a chapter for the zoological account of the expedition. There were several ‘new’ species. This spectacular corvid named for Collie was one of them. Beechey was not left out; the  Purplish-backed Jay (now Cyanocorax beecheii) from the same part of Mexico was named for him. Vigors, the first Secretary of the newly established Zoological Society of London was at the time also heavily involved in the opening and early growth of London Zoo, the formation of a museum for the Society, as well as a practising barrister. The offices, library and museum were at 33 Bruton Street.

Vigors published preliminary account of the birds from Beechey’s expedition in the Zoological Journal in 1829:

Frederick William Beechey

Captain Beechey, on his return from the late expedition to the Western shores of North America, having kindly transmitted to me the publick collection of birds formed during that expedition, for the purpose of making a catalogue of them for the Appendix to the forthcoming account of his voyage, and several other species also from the same locality, but not existing in the publick collection, having been presented to the Zoological Society from various quarters, I have had the pleasing opportunity of observing among them many species which are rarely found in our home collections, as well as a few which appear altogether new to science. Being aware of the advantages arising from the speedy publication of such recent acquisitions, and presuming that some time must elapse before the Account of the Voyage will appear, I have requested and obtained Captain Beechey's permission to give a brief account of a few of the more interesting species in our Journal, previously to their appearing more at large in the Appendix to his work. In this undertaking I shall confine myself merely to the technical description of the birds. The more valuable part of the account of them will be reserved for the more detailed work; in which I may here venture to promise much interesting information, extracted from the journal of Mr. Collie, Surgeon, and Mr. Tradescant Lay, Naturalist, to the expedition. The notes of these gentlemen not only furnish us with the habits and localities of the birds which have been brought home, but also with what is rarely attended to by collectors abroad, an account of their internal structure.

There follows the description of the two new species. Here is Mr Collie’s bird:

PICA COLLIEL.

Pica macula subrictali, corporeque suprà caruleis; fronte, cristá, genis, colloque inferiore nigris; corpore subtus, rectricumque externarum apicibus albis, caudú elongatissimá.

Crista erecta, elongata, antrorsum spectans, facies pectusque intensê nigra. Supercilia, colli latera, pectusque medium albo notata. Tectrices inferiores alba. Rectrices quatuor media suprà carulea, subtùs nigrae. Longitudo corporis ab apice rostri ad apicem cauda, 2 Ped., 4 Unc.; rostri, 1 7/10 ; ale a carpo ad remigem 5tam, 8; cauda ad apicem rectricis media, 19½; externa, 6 ; tarsi, 2.

This beautiful species, which was met with at San Blas, was not in the publick collection sent to me by Captain Beechey. The specimen from which the above description was taken, was presented to the Zoological Society by A. Collie, Esq., Surgeon to the Blossom, to whose exertions, during the expedition, natural science owes many important obligations. To him I beg leave to dedicate the species.

HMS Blossom leaving Spithead 19 May 1825

Fort San Basilio, San Blas
Built in 1760, the fort overlooks the whole area of San Blas and the sea

Vigors NA. 1829. On some species of birds from the north-west coast of America. Zoological Journal 4, 352-358.

‘Perpetuating a mischief’: Sharpey-Schafer’s Classic Histology Textbook Displaced by Evelyn Hewer’s

It is 1959. The two of us starting ‘A’ level Zoology that year really thought we had had started playing with the big boys. Instead of the elementary textbooks used for ‘A’ level Biology we had access to the very few more advanced book kept in a glass-fronted cupboard in the biology library. One of the books was Essentials of Histology by Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer. I cannot remember which edition it was which is not surprising when, after the first in 1885, it had reached 14 by 1938 and, finally, 16 by 1954, nearly 20 years after the death of the original author. Sharpey-Schafer was for decades the histology text in British universities. Thus It came as something as a shock on reaching university that the recommended textbook was not Sharpey-Schafer but Histology for Medical Students by Evelyn E. Hewer which was, in October 1962, in its 7th edition and shortly to reach its 8th. That shock was amplified by finding the histology course was held on Saturday mornings.

An illustration from Sharpey-Schafer (5th Edition, 1898)
It is interesting to note that although the myopithelial cells had already been described by German
histologists, later shown to be responsible for milk ejection, Schafer made no mention of them

From Hills Biographical Memoir of Sharpey-Schafer

The American 5th Edition  available
online at Internet Archive

Microscopy with its attendant techniques for histology and cytology involving reagents and equipment with exotic-sounding  and esoteric names were central to zoology as well as to the medical sciences. Few labs were without the equipment necessary to produce microscope slides of whatever organism, organ, tissue or cell was being studied. Mammalian histology for medical and medical science students was though taught then and somewhat anomalously by physiology departments, following the precepts of Sharpey-Schafer himself who was a physiologist.

Schafer held strongly to the view that histology should be part of physiological teaching and deplored the modern tendency to relegate it to the anatomist. Up to Sharpey’s time Anatomy had been considered to be the foundation of medicine and surgery; the young Schafer pointed out that this was only justifiable if the object of medical education were to provide physicians, not for the living, but for the dead, and in 1885 he published Essentials of Histology, a book aimed at supplying students with data necessary for understanding physiological functions.

Jumping to ten years or so later, the coffee room conversation had turned to some point of histology that needed to be looked up. Heading for the door into the corridor, JLL, in his usual stentorian voice said, ‘I’ll get my copy of Schafer’. That announcement was met by a boom and a plume of cigar smoke from the cell-like office across the corridor. Its occupant, Amo, shouted, ‘You’ll be perpetuating a mischief if you do!’ Amo then appeared through the fug to extol the virtues of Hewer over Sharpey-Schafer. I went off to get my copy but neither volume provided the information we were looking for.

I was reminded of this rivalry between two textbooks when writing about William Rowan and the control of reproduction and migration by daylength, since it is Sharpey-Schafer who came up with the idea in the early years of the 20th century. The insight also reveals the breadth of Schafer’s knowledge, interest and leadership far beyond the narrow approach that became manifest in the physiology departments of some medical schools. Preceding generations also simply referred to Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer as Schafer because that was his original name. He was born Edward Albert Schäfer in London, the son of German immigrant who became naturalized and a British mother. As a medical student at University College London Schafer was greatly influenced by William Sharpey (1802-1880)  who was professor of anatomy and physiology. Later, Schafer became the first Sharpey Scholar in 1873. Both of Schafer’s  sons were killed in the First World War, one had as one of his names, Sharpey. In order to commemorate Sharpey and his sons, Schafer took the surname Sharpey-Schafer in 1918.

The later editions of Essentials of Histology were revised mainly by Harry Montgomerie Carleton (1896-1956) who taught histology and histological techniques at Oxford—in the Sharpey-Schafer tradition in the physiology department.

A battered copy of the last edition
revised by Evelyn Hewer

Compared with 1885, Hewer’s Histology for Medical Students was the newcomer to the textbook market. with the first edition appearing in 1937. The final (9th edition) was published in 1969 but Hewer dropped out of the further revisions after the 5th when she retired. Evelyn Everard Hewer (1889-1975) was Reader in Histology in the University of London and first Demonstrator, then Assistant Lecturer and then Lecturer in Physiology at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School in London. She was born in north London on 4 June 1889, the daughter of Joseph Langton Hewer, a general practitioner with an MD degree, and his wife, Annie Martha, a writer (Our Baby: For Mothers and Nurses, Antiseptics: a Handbook for Nurses,  and reviewer). She educated at the North London Collegiate School for Girls and entered Bedford College for Women in 1908. She listed the subjects of her first degree: Maths, Chemistry and Zoology, and graduated in 2010. The honours course was another year and she graduated with first-class honours in physiology in 1911. In 1909 she had been listed as a medical student at Bedford College but clearly went down the science rather than the medical degree route. She was then awarded a University Studentship for research (£50 for the year) and obtained an MSc, the highest degree available at the time, in 1916. In the days before the PhD she was awarded the higher doctorate (probably on the basis of publications and, possibly in London University, a thesis) in science in 1922.

By the time of the 1921 census Evelyn Hewer was lecturing in the physiology department of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women; there she stayed for the rest of her career, at some stage being appointed Lecturer and then Reader in Histology by the University of London. It was then possible to be a Reader in the university but a Lecturer in a constituent college. The various censuses and electoral registers from the early decades of the last century show her living with her parents in Highbury, London (1911), St Albans (1921), Finchley Road, London (1929) and Lyndale Avenue, London (1930, 1934). However, in 1919 she was living on her own in a flat in Hammersmith.

Her only appearance in the newspapers to which I have access concerned her research studentship and an accident in July 1915 (Western Times 29 July) in which the car she was driving  with her sister as passenger collided with another in South Molton, Devon. A virtually identical collision had occurred at the same spot as another four days earlier. Both front wheels ‘were broken clean off’. ‘There were other injuries of a minor character’.

Evelyn Hewer published on a variety of topics, generally concerned with human early embryonic development and the physiological events of pregnancy. She was also co-author of a book on the nervous system in 1929. One of her papers (with Mary Frances Lucas Keene (1885 –1977), professor of anatomy at the Royal Free and the first female professor of anatomy in the UK), was a classic and of particular interest to me.  They were the first to describe the separate origins of the human fetal adrenocortical tissue and the adrenal cortex of the adult.

Evelyn Hewer died on 2 December 1975. Her address was given as 3 Hamp Green Rise, Bridgwater, Somerset; she was 86.

Both textbooks must have very profitable for their publishers. I suspect that both were run on beyond their sell-by-dates, for 69 and 32 years. Revising textbooks is an increasingly difficult job with the passage of time and the point comes when a fresh approach is needed. I cannot remember why Amo thought Sharpey-Schafer’s book, at least in its later editions, was ‘perpetuating a mischief’. 

Hill, LE. 1935. Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer, 1850-1935. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1, 401-407 doi: 10.1098/rsbm.1935.0005

Lucas Keene MFL, Hewer, EE. 1927. Observations on the development of the human suprarenal gland. Journal of Anatomy 61, 302-324

Citreoline Trogon: a bird endemic to western Mexico

Citreoline Trogon
1 February 2025, El Jorullo, Jalisco, Mexico

We saw this Citreoline Trogon after walking across the 470 metre long suspension bridge at El Jorullo a few miles inland from Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. We had to wait for a while because Canopy River park is used for all sorts of outdoor activities and several convoys of all-terrain vehicles were heading in the opposite direction. The suitability for such vehicles makes it, so it is claimed, the longest vehicular suspension bridge in the world. The whole area has been owned and operated since 1940 by an association of local foresters; the vehicles and zip wire etc came later, after 2005. The Sierra Madre mountains provide a backdrop to the protected area of forest while the Cuale River runs way below the bridge.

Jorullo Suspension Bridge

The Citreoline Trogon (Trogon citreolus) is endemic to the woods and forests of western Mexico. They nest by digging into the nests of tree termites. This one was eating berries and at various times of year eat either or both fruit and insects.

From the photograph at high magnification it can be seen that the trogon has two toes visible at the front. Does that make it a zygodactyl like parrots and woodpeckers? Well, no. It does have two toes at the front and two at the back but in trogons digits 3 and 4 face forward while 1 and 2 face back. In zygodactyly, 2 and 3 face forward and 1 and 4 back. Trogons are thus described as heterodactylous.

There were mammalian delights too along the trail through the forest beyond the suspension bridge but they are for later.

Comparative Endocrinology Revisited: Hellbenders, Giant Salamanders and their hormones

Hellbender from the Appalachian Mountains
Brian Gratwicke Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

In a recent article I mentioned that there is still discussion on why the adrenal glands of different groups and species of vertebrates produce either or both of the two steroid hormones, cortisol and corticosterone. Both are these hormones are glucocorticoids, originally named for their effect on glucose metabolism and both have wide-ranging effects on the body. Both have a little mineralocorticoid action, i.e. acting to retain sodium, the role of the other major adrenal steroid hormone, aldosterone. In different tissues of different animals corticosterone and cortisol have been found to have slight differences in their mineralocorticoid action.

The difference between corticosterone and cortisol is the absence or presence of a hydroxyl moiety at the 17 carbon position of the steroid molecule. Corticosterone does not have it; cortisol does. In some mammals, rats and mice for example, the adrenal cortex does not have the enzyme 17α-hydroxylase* An earlier chemical precursor of cortisol is therefore not produced, leaving corticosterone as the only glucocorticoid produced by the rat adrenal. Since aldosterone has been found in all vertebrates, corticosterone must also be produced since it is a precursor in aldosterone synthesis. In some animals that produce both corticosterone and cortisol, one or the other may predominate. In primates it is cortisol.

The structural difference between corticosterone and cortisol (ringed in red)
Adapted from the classic textbook by Aubrey Gorbman and Howard Bern,
A Textbook of Comparative Endocrinology, New York: John Wiley. 1962

A paper published in 2020 raised an interesting question and demolished the generally accepted view that corticosterone is the major and perhaps the only major glucocorticoid produced by the adrenal cortex of amphibians. Hellbenders (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis) are the American relatives of the Giant Salamanders of East Asia. They too are large, but not so large, up to 70 cm in length, long-lived and fully aquatic. As part of an extensive study of an amphibian in decline in the wild, the concentration of cortisol was found to be five times that of corticosterone in blood taken from a tail vein. The difference was even greater—up to ten times—after the injection of mammalian adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH). The authors suggested that cortisol may predominate, as it does in fish, in these aquatic salamanders since in other vertebrates cortisol has a somewhat greater mineralocorticoid activity than corticosterone thereby preserving salt and water balance. However, that inference, at first sight, does not seem to hold. In work done in Hong Kong by my old fellow postgraduate student Samuel Chan, Tom Sandor (1924-2003) (a doyen of steroid biosynthesis in vertebrates) and Brian Lofts (1929-2015) only corticosterone was found after adrenal tissue from similarly aquatic Chinese giant salamanders (Andrias) was incubated with radiolabelled precursors in the steroidogenic pathway.

The authors of the papers on the Hellbender drew up a table showing previous studies on the occurrence of corticosterone and cortisol in amphibians and emphasised the difficulties of interpreting studies in which blood concentrations were recorded and experiments on adrenal tissue in vitro. They also noted that a number of studies were done before reliable methods had been established for identifying and quantifying corticosterone in the presence of cortisol and vice versa. They made sure that they established the chemical identity of the hormones using mass spectroscopy—something not possible in the early studies with the low but biologically active concentrations found in blood plasma. However, there is another difference that may be significant: the site from which blood was taken. Because the analytical methods did not exist at the time to study hormones in peripheral blood, John Phillips (1933-1987) made his name in the late 1950s by devising techniques to sample blood from the veins draining the adrenal gland or from those that carried a high proportion of adrenal venous effluent. The distinction is important because, as I suggest below, any production of adrenocortical-like hormones from elsewhere in the body would not have been at detectable concentrations.

What could be the explanation of the findings in the Hellbender and indeed in those amphibians in which both corticosterone and cortisol have been found to be present in the blood (albeit with the caveats on methodology outlined above)? I suggest there are two hypotheses which are not mutually exclusive:

1. The adrenal tissue expresses the gene CYP17A1 that produces 17α-hydroxylase during the breeding season but not at other times. The Hellbenders sampled were, as the authors note, caught in late summer ‘prior to nesting because at this time adult male and female hellbenders can be distinguished by the swollen cloaca of males’. There is evidence gathered in the first half of the twentieth century that the adrenal of many amphibians varies in appearance, both macroscopic and microscopic, according to season. In newts and salamanders the adrenals are multi-segmented strands of tissue on the ventral side of the kidneys. In the California Newt (Taricha torosa), as one example, during the two-month breeding season the adrenal is bright orange in colour and expanded compared wit the non-breeding season when the gland is dull, smaller and flatter. In other words, the gland waxes and wanes and it is easy to imagine that the production of 17α-hydroxylase follows a similar pattern. An adrenal with 17α-hydroxylase is also capable of producing androgens that might play a role in reproduction.
2. The adrenal is not the site of cortisol synthesis or secretion. The gonads in a number of vertebrates are known to be capable of synthesis and secretion of adrenocorticosteroids. Of necessity in being able to sythesise androgens and oestrogens they must express CYP17A1. The adrenal, testis and ovary are all of similar embryonic origin and complete separation of steroid synthesis and secretion   is far from complete with overt clumps of cells characteristic of the adrenal cortex being present in the ovary.

A possible clue as to the cellular origins of of the two adrenal steroids is that while in the Hellbender both corticosterone and cortisol concentrations increased in response to ACTH the time course was different and there was no correlation between concentrations of the two hormones in blood at any time point. Thus corticosterone reached a peak at one hour after ACTH; cortisol at three hours. Does this finding suggest a different cellular origin of the two steroids? I suspect that it does with either two cell populations in the adrenal itself (one only seasonally present producing cortisol and probably androgens, the ‘permanent’ cells producing corticosterone) or of the adrenal producing corticosterone and the ovary and testis producing cortisol as well as androgens and oestrogens.

Assuming that the other members of the cryptobranchid family have a similar endocrine system, both of these possibilities are compatible with the finding of cortisol and corticosterone in the blood of Hellbenders but the finding of only corticosterone  being produced in vitro by the adrenal of Chinese giant salamanders, assuming of course the latter were not in the breeding season or breeding condition.

Chinese Giant Salamander (Andrias sp)
On the roof of the now demolished Northcote Science Building
Univewrsity of Hong Kong ca 1966

I would argue that the next step in solving this problem lies in China where farm-bred Giant Salamanders are readily available in the restaurant trade. The question is a simple one: what are the concentrations of corticosterone and cortisol in the blood at different stages of the reproductive cycle? Modern students may prefer the question in molecular biological terms: where are the sites of expression of the gene CYP17A1?

...And surely the Axolotl is just asking to be looked at!

Comparative endocrinology may no longer be fashionable but there are still important areas where new knowledge and a look at unsolved old problems are needed if we are to understand how signalling systems that operate between organs and tissues work. The science of intercellular signalling is now being neglected. 

*I have seen the odd paper showing cortisol as present in mice (at least in a particular strain of lab mouse) but without comment as to the significance of the finding.

The paper on the Hellbender:

Hopkins WA, DuRant SE, Beck ML, Ray WK, Helm RF, Romero LM. 2020. Cortisol is the predominant glucocorticoid in the giant paedomorphic hellbender salamander (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis). General and Comparative Endocrinology 285, 113267 doi: 10.1016/j.ygcen.2019.113267

The paper on the Chinese Giant Salamander:

Chan STH, Sandor T, Lofts B, 1975. A histological, histochemical, and biochemical study of the adrenal tissue of the Chinese giant salamander (Andrias davidianus Blanchard). General and Comparative Endocrinology 25, 509–516 doi: 10.1016/0016-6480(75)90161-6

For the older literature on the adrenal gland of amphibians:

Chester Jones I. 1957. The Adrenal Cortex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

UPDATED 17 JUNE 2025

Crocodiles and Birds at the Mirador de las Aves near San Blas in Mexico

We have seen lots of crocodilians in the wild but rarely doing anything but sunning themselves or just lying in the water. When we pulled into a lay-by complete with food stalls and an iron-railinged viewing area on the outskirts of San Blas in Mexico to look at the birds on the lagoon and in the surrounding mangroves, I had read that American Crocodiles (Crocodylus acutus) could be seen there. The lay-by whose name gives a clue as to its avian delights, Mirador de las Aves, is clearly a popular place to stop, buy a snack and look at the wildlife as locals drive along the road on a Sunday evening.

And there were crocodiles, large ones hauled out just under the viewing platform and basking in the sun on the edge of the lagoon. However, as the sun went down and moved off the crocodiles they entered the water and several apparently began searching the bottom for food with one, as the video below shows, emerging to swallow something small it had caught or found. Eventually I counted seven moving around offshore or simply hanging in the water as dusk fell.

Animals of the Namib Desert. The South African Zoologist Who Worked Out How They Survive On the Foggy Foggy Dew

Last month we had a very brief visit, counted in minutes not hours, to Stellenbosch in South Africa. A few days later we were visiting Namibia for a couple of days and for a second time. The Namibian desert with its sand dunes is famous for the ways in which the various species of animals and plants that live there obtain water. The Namib is very different to what many think of as a desert because although it lacks rain it gets regular and small amounts of water delivered to it in the air.  In short it is a land of fog and dew. The sea off Namibia is cold by virtue of the Benguela current running north. Thus fog banks form along the coast which are blown into the western part of the Namib. Water vapour condenses on surfaces during the cool night and penetrates the soil during the hot day. We have all seen on television the ways in which some beetles channel condensed water collected on their bodies into their mouths.  Snakes lick condensed water collected on their scales. Dune lizards, which occur only in the fog belt of the Namib, by contrast, drink avidly from surfaces and sand but then store water in the expanded caecum for several months. The Hairy-footed Gerbil (Gerbillurus paeba), unlike some other desert rodents, cannot not survive on dried seed alone; it relies on water from the succulent plants that in turn rely on the fog and dew.

The only university building we had time to see in Stellenbosch
housed the Faculty of Theology

Namibia and Stellenbosch were connected in my mind because exactly 50 years ago we had a visiting worker in the department, the man who put the desert animals of Namibia on the map. Gideon Louw* spent January to June 1975 working on mammalian thermoregulation with John Bligh. Although the rest of the department did not see much of him, he did come along for a chat several times and we discussed all sorts of things about how all sorts of animals work in all sorts of environments. I remember the impression of a very nice man but deeply troubled by events in his own country. He was, I now learn, then shortly to move from his position as Professor of Zoology in Stellenbosch to the University of Cape Town. Biographers have recorded that Gideon Louw was a founder member of the Progressive Party which was utterly opposed to the apartheid policies being imposed by the government then in power. Stellenbosch was I have also learnt a  stronghold of support for the National Party and an uncomfortable place for those opposed to its policies.

Gideon Louw

In an appreciation of the work of Gideon Louw published in 2004, Joh Henschel and Mary Sealy wrote (references  omitted):

In hyperarid areas such as the Namib Desert the occurrence of fog and dew plays an important role in the water economy of many desert organisms. This fact was known, particularly through the works of Walter (1936) and Koch (1961), by the time that Louw first visited the Gobabeb Training & Research Centre in the Namib Desert in 1966.

Louw soon recognised that ecophysiological mechanisms were a key towards understanding the relationship between atmospheric moisture and desert organisms. Extensive contributions of this doyen of desert ecophysiology range from water, energy, and salt balance, to thermal biology, conjunctively in terms of physiology, behaviour and ecology. He inspired a generation of students and colleagues to elucidate these mechanisms and their consequences, and later reviewed some of these insights.

Like a number of others working in his field, Louw did not have a first or even a higher degree in zoology. He had started on the animal science of agriculture and his first job was as an agricultural geneticist. Several spells in the USA, including a PhD in endocrinology at Cornell, followed before he returned to South Africa and a personal chair in zoology at Stellenbosch.

Louw’s work in Namibia became well known internationally when he was invited by Geoffrey Maloiy, the organiser, to a Zoological Society of London Symposium ‘Comparative Physiology of Desert Animals’ in July 1971, a meeting I had to miss because of a clash of dates. The published volume is still worth reading since all the major players in the field were contributors and showed the state of play after a major burst of activity that followed World War II.

Gideon Louw did much more than his research on the animals and environment of the Namib including writing several books, while his students have spread across the world and are well-established names in the biological sciences. From the reading I have done it appears that he was appalled by the political violence sweeping South Africa in the early 1990s and retired to Canada. He died on Vancouver Island on 22 March 2004, aged 73.

SJP spotted this lizard in the dunes at the deserted mining village of Kolmanskop
near Luderitz in Namibia. It is the Common Rough-scaled Lizard(Meroles
squamulosa) a psammophilous species closely related to the dune lizard
(M. anchietae) studied by Gideon Louw
(Noble Caledonia Expedition Team Photograph)

This beetle was on the dunes at Kolmanskop

Lichens on rocks in the desert get their water from the dew

The reason this lichen is so green is that there had been rain
sufficient for water from the Swakop River to empty into
the Atlantic as in 2011 and 2022

A wide-angle view from the 'moonscape' viewpoint inland from Swakopmund

*Gideon Nel Louw, born 24 December 1930 East London, South Africa; died 22 March 2004.

Anon. 2004. Tribute to world-renowned zoologist. University of Cape Town News HERE

Cherry M. 2005. Gideon Louw (1930-2004). South African Journal of Science 101, 399.

Henschel JR, Seely MK. 2004. First Approximation of the Ecophysiology of Fog and Dew – A Tribute to Gideon Louw. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Fog, Fog Collection and Dew: Cape Town, South Africa, 11-15 October 2004 [no page numbers shown].

Louw GN. 1972. The role of advective fog in the water economy of certain Namib desert animals. Symposia of the Zoological Society of London 31, 297-314.

Roseate Spoonbills Feeding in Mexico

 

Roseate Spoonbills (Platalea ajaja) were feeding in a roadside lagoon near San Blas on the Pacific Coast of Mexico in early February. Having seen all six species of spoonbill on our travels around the world these were by far the most active we had come across. The frantic sweeping of the bill left and right, the sudden snap shut and the lift to swallow whatever they have caught is an amazing spectacle. If you look closely at my video you will see one catches and swallows a small fish.

There have been all sorts of suggestions as to how spoonbills detect the prey passing between the upper and lower ‘spoons’ and thus rigger the bill to snap closed. There is a good discussion of the topic by Bruce Taggart HERE.

We passed this lagoon (with a restaurant by the edge) several times. Each time it had large numbers of Great (Great White) (Ardea alba) and Snowy Egrets (Egretta thula), as well as the spoonbills.

Do Not Annoy an Amphiuma

I came across a video on YouTube which reminded me of what happened 49 years ago and the tale that followed. In previous articles I have recounted the appearance of the now critically endangered giant salamanders of China in the zoology department of the University of Hong Kong for class dissection. We took some on to the roof to photograph them before they were killed ready for the students  One lunged with its mouth open and snapped at SJP’s hand which she withdrew rather rapidly thus avoiding a bite.

Back down in the lab we were told that John Phillips, the head of department, had been bitten badly by another amphibian, an amphiuma, and that he had, as a result, had a recurring fever which took a long time to go away.

I should say that I have never seen an amphiuma, alive or dead, but to anglers and commercial fishermen in the right part of the USA they are a familiar sight. Amphiumas are eel-like salamanders which can grow to over a  metre in length. They are virtually entirely aquatic, living in swamps, lakes and ponds, but will move on land after heavy rain. They are nocturnal and carnivorous.

What was John doing with amphiumas I asked myself, knowing that in the late 1950s or early 1960s it would be something to do with the hormones produced by the adrenal cortex. After a bit of searching I found a reference that provided some of the information. The results were reported as part of a paper given at a symposium on comparative endocrinology held at Cold Spring Harbor in  May 1958. John had arrived in the USA in September 1957 after working for his PhD in Liverpool. I cannot be certain whether his encounter with an amphiuma was in Liverpool or shortly after his arrival at Yale on Fellowship of the Commonwealth Fund of New York. I cannot get hold of the paper (published in 1959) but I suspect it did not give much further information on where the various studies were done. Since he is known to have continued his work on adrenocortical secretions in vertebrates at that time, my bet would have been Yale until when looking for someting else I came across an advertisement  in Cage Birds of 4 July 1957. Robert Jackson, the animal dealer who went on to found the Welsh Mountain Zoo, had for sale amphiumas for £7. 10 shillings. They were under one of their American common names, 'Congo Eel' salamanders (based of coutse on their resemblance to the marine Conger Eel).  Amphiumas were readily available in the USA from biological suppliers and it seems a few made it to dealers in Britain. Thus it is possible - and given the proximity of the dealer to Liverpool - that John Phillips studied the amphiuma before leaving for the USA. 

The amphiuma in question was a Three-toed Amphiuma (Amphiuma tridactylum) easily distinguished by the number of toes on its tiny legs. Its distribution is ‘centered on the lower Mississippi River from Texas to western Alabama, and north to southern Illinois and extreme southwestern Kentucky’. They were and probably still are a source for laboratory suppliers since they are a bycatch from crayfish trapping.

Three-toed Amphiuma
Photo by Ashley Wahlberg (Tubbs) via Flickr

All descriptions of amphiumas note that they bite savagely as well as being very difficult to handle because of the slimy mucus on the tough skin. It is no wonder amphiumas are called ‘eels’ as in ‘congo eels’, a term derived from conger eels. No wonder John Phillips got bitten and became infected by some pathogen lurking at the bottom of a swamp.

As the following video shows, it is not only when handling amphiumas that they are liable to bite.

Seventy years since John Phillips started his pioneering work there is still active research and discussion on why the adrenal glands of different groups and species of vertebrates produce either or both of the two steroid hormones, cortisol and corticosterone. Indeed, the field is just hotting up again.

*John Guest Phillips FRS.1933-1987.

UPDATED 16 July 2025

Chester Jones I, Phillips JG, Holmes WN. 1959. Comparative physiology of the adrenal cortex. In Comparative Endocrinology: Proceedings of the Columbia University Symposium held at Cold Spring Harbor 1958. (ed. A. Gorbman), 582-612. New York: Wiley.

Sandor T. 1969. A comparative survey of steroids and steroidogenic pathways throughout the vertebrates. General and Comparative Endocrinology Supplement 2, 284-298.

Vinson GP, Tait JF. 1988. John Guest Phillips. 13 June 1933-14 March 1987. Biographical Memoirs  of Fellows of the Royal Society 34, 610-637 doi: 10.1098/rsbm.1988.0020

Identification of the Coelacanth in 1939. A fishy story or just a fishy story?

If the 1950s had a celebrity species, it was the Coelacanth. Mysterious and only recently discovered to be alive rather than existing as fossilised remains, there was massive media coverage of this ‘living fossil’. The second specimen was discovered in 1952 and the story was kept fresh by the publication of J.L.B. Smith’s book published in London as Old Fourlegs. The Story of the Coelacanth and in New York as The Search Beneath the Sea – The Story of the Coelacanth, in 1956.

Coverage of the story was all over the media and I remember late one night in the late 1950s staying at my grandmother cousin’s house in Hendon, north London, searching for something to read in her extensive bookshelves. I picked up a copy of Reader’s Digest and there was the intriguing title of an article, ‘The fish named L.C. Smith’.  The title was of course an abbreviation of the scientific name, Latimeria chalumnae Smith 1939.

Rhodes University

The central character of the coelacanth story is James Leonard Brierley Smith (1897–1968). He was an organic chemist, educated in South Africa. He then did research in Cambridge. He received the 14th Ph.D. degree to be awarded by that university in 1922 for a thesis entitled, Interaction of sulphur monochloride with substituted ethylenes. He was plagued by illness which began while serving in the army during the First World War; this continued after he had returned to South Africa and life as a lecturer in the chemistry department of the University of Grahamstown. An interest in sea fishing developed into research in ichthyology an arrangement that often did not meet with the approval of the university. He was, when it came to fish, a professional scientist and university lecturer but an amateur ichthyologist. By the late 1930s he had become though the acknowledged expert on the fishes of South Africa.

The basic story of the discovery of the first specimen is well known.  On 22 December 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer (1907– 2004), the enthusiastic curator of the East London Museum in Eastern Cape, answered a telephone call  from the skipper of a trawler asking if she would have a look at some interesting bycatch. One fish stood out: five-feet long, beautifully coloured with hard scales, limb-like fins and a distinctive tail. She did not know what it was. She and an assistant carried it in a taxi to the museum but after consulting her books still could not identify it. She then wrote to J.L.B. Smith at Rhodes University in Grahamstown including in her letter a drawing of the fish. But he was away and Miss Courtenay-Latimer grew increasingly desperate as the fish (refused entry into the local mortuary’s frig and the cold store) by now wrapped in formalin-soaked blankets in the premises of the town taxidermist was starting to go off. Eventually, and desperate to preserve something, she had the taxidermist skin and stuff the fish in the manner of a ‘game’ fish. Smith’s eventually received the letter while he was still away from Grahamstown in Knysna, 350 miles from East London. He immediately realised from the drawing that he was looking at something special when it dawned on him that it could be a coelacanth. Scales from the fish were sent to him which convinced him that it was indeed a coelacanth. When he and his wife were back in Grahamstown they travelled to East London to see the fish. It really was a coelacanth. And the world went coelacanth crazy as the news got out. The fish had been caught off the mouth of the Chalumna River. Smith therefore came up with the scientific name to mark the achievement of Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer in realising the fish was something special and doing everything she could to get it preserved and identified together its origin. One might have thought that commemorating the Captain of the trawler, Nerine, Handrik Goosen, might have been more appropriate since he could easily have chucked the by-catch coelacanth over the side; instead he consulted the local museum.

from Smith 1956

Key locations in the identification of the coelacanth
Having passed down this coast by ship last month I wonder how close
we came to a living coelacanth

from Smith 1956

The coelacanth from December 1938 as Smith saw it on reaching East London
from Smith 1956

But there is a twist. While looking for something else entirely I came across an excellent history of the entomology and zoology department of Rhodes University in Grahamstown (now Makhanda) and found this:

[J.C.] Van Hille always considered that Alice Lyle never received credit for her achievements. He also believed that she played a critical role in the identification of the first coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) in 1938. In a letter to Miles dated 30 April 1980 van Hille wrote: “The zoo lecturer you refer to was Alice Lyle, she was a dear! It was actually she who identified the coela canth. Miss Latimer, of the East London museum saw that it was something quaint and kept it in formalin in her bath. She sent a little sketch to J.L.B. [Smith] who was on holiday in Knysna and was slow in reacting. Eventually he took the sketch to Omer-Cooper {the head of department and an entomologist] who also had no idea. Alice came in to bring them tea and saw it and said ‘I have seen it before’. She studied in Bloemfontein [Grey University College which became the University College of the Orange Free State] where the emphasis was on vertebrates. Omer was more of an Entomologist and Smith a Chemist. So Alice got the Cambridge Natural History from the library and there was a good picture of the coelacanth. I [van Hille] have this story from Omer and always think of it when in all the books and articles it mentions that J.L.B identified the coelacanth.” Lyle resigned from Rhodes in 1949 for an appointment as Guide Lecturer at the Durban Museum, where she also lectured to 1st year medical students at Natal University. She was appointed to Fort Hare as Professor of Zoology in 1952 but sadly died in October of that year in Cape Town.

I have found no indication that it was Alice Lyle who identified the drawing as a coelacanth before Smith. His letters, reproduced in his book, show that he was virtually convinced it was a coelacanth before leaving Knysna and had written to Courtenay-Latimer to say so. It is tempting to speculate that Smith may have gone to the zoology department looking for illustrations of coelacanths and that Alice Lyle found one in the Cambridge Natural History Volume 7. However, that illustration is from Arthur Smith Woodward’s 1888 catalogue of fossil fishes in the Natural History Museum in London and we know from Smith’s book that he had already consulted that volume, having had it sent from Cape Town to Knysna when he realised the possibility that he may be dealing with a coelacanth. Indeed, he adapted the illustration from Smith Woodward for his 1956 book.

Illustration in the Cambridge Natural History

from Smith 1956

Smith’s visit to the zoology department must have been during the second week of February 1939. As shown in the quoted passage below, Smith had intended to drive straight from Knysna to East London. However, the roads were difficult because of heavy rain and he had to head for Grahamstown and stay there a week before reaching East London on 16 February.

We are left pondering. Is the story of Alice Lyle identifying the coelacanth, in fishy terms, a red herring (zoologically, a clupea rubra)? Was a conversation misheard in which Smith consulted colleagues to see if they agreed with his tentative identification? Beyond that sort of explanation we would be in the realms of conspiracy theory.

Finally, the passage from Smith’s book in which he saw at long last what became the most famous fish in the world:

We left Knysna on the 8th February 1939, intending to go straight through to East London, but there was to be nothing easy about this, for we travelled in continuous heavy rain and were fortunate to reach Grahamstown, since by that time floods had rendered almost all roads impassable. Drifts and slippery mud made motoring in South Africa no light undertaking in those days. We had to wait a whole week before the roads to East London became usable, and after an awful journey reached there on the16th February 1939.

We went straight to the Museum. Miss Latimer was out for the moment, the caretaker ushered us into the inner room and there was the—Coelacanth, yes, God! Although I had come prepared, that first sight hit me like a white-hot blast and made me feel shaky and queer, my body tingled. I stood as if stricken to stone. Yes, there was not a shadow of doubt, scale by scale, bone by bone, fin by fin, it was a true Coelacanth. It could have been one of those creatures of 200 million years ago come alive again. I forgot everything else and just looked and looked, and then almost fearfully went close up and touched and stroked, while my wife watched in silence. Miss Latimer came in and greeted us warmly. It was only then that speech came back, the exact words I have forgotten, but it was to tell them that it was true, it was really true, it was unquestionably a Coelacanth. Not even I could doubt any more.

Live coelacanth seen off Pumula on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast, South Africa, 2019
Bruce A.S. Henderson, CC BY 4.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Go! & Express. 27 February 2020
The coin was minted in 1998

Bruton, MN, Coutouvidis SE, Pote J. 1991 Bibliography of the living coelacanth Latimeria chalumnae, with comments on publication trends. Environmental Biology of Fishes 32, 403-433.

Dugan J. 1955. The fished named  L.c. Smith. Reader’s Digest, December 1955, 147-151.

Hodgson AN, Craig AJFK. 2005. A century of zoology and entomology at Rhodes University, 1905 to 2005. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 60, 1-18.

Smith JLB. 1956. Old Fourlegs. The Story of the Coelacanth. London: Longmans, Green and The Search Beneath the Sea. The Story of the Coelacanth. New York: Henry Holt.