Edward Bles. Part 4. Cambridge: Olms and Paul Kammerer

At the end of April 1923, 12 Madingley Road had a house guest. Edward and Bertha Bles were entertaining Paul Kammerer who had been invited to give a talk to the Cambridge Natural History Society about his claims on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Bles and Kammerer would have had much to talk about since both kept and bred amphibians, and three of Kammerer’s claims centred on such species, the Midwife Toad (Alytes obstetricans), the Fire Salamander (Salamandra salamandra) and, to a certain extent, the Olm (Proteus anguinus).

The lecture at Cambridge provided the opportunity for a verbal punch-up between the neo-Darwinists and the neo-Lamarckians. Discussion at the time was concerned with the possibility that the scientific world was being gulled by a plausible fraudster. Despite the efforts of some to resurrect Kammerer’s reputation, notably the mystic and over-taken-notice-of Arthur Koestler with his book, The Case of the Midwife Toad, informed opinion seems to have swayed towards the view that Kammerer’s studies were fraudulent since there are plausible explanations as to how he, possibly with the assistance of others, had contrived to present doctored evidence that favoured his Lamarckian hypothesis.

There is a letter from George Albert Boulenger mentioned in Koestler’s book stating that Bles had visited Kammerer in Vienna at some time around 1908, so their meeting, at which all parties would have spoken German given Kammerer’s limited conversational English, would have been an opportunity to catch up. It would have been interesting to know if Hans Gadow (1855-1928) was also present. He helped Kammerer by translating the discussion at the Cambridge lecture but was not impressed by his science. Gadow was another amphibian enthusiast, notably writing the classic volume in the Cambridge Natural History series, but also keeping and breeding them at his house Cleramendi (since renamed) on Hinton Way at Great Shelford. I get the impression that Bles and Gadow were close; they operated as a team as two of the local organsers of the 1898 zoological congress held in Cambridge.

Both Kammerer and Bles had kept Olms, the cave-dwelling blind salamander of south-eastern Europe. Kammerer claimed to have bred them in captivity, a claim now strongly disputed since his ‘findings’ bear no relation to what has been observed either before or since, i.e. that they are viviparous and breed every year or so. Both had found that when kept in the light, the normally white animals turn black. Bles got there first on that one since Hans Gadow in his book published in 1901 wrote:

Mr. Bles has succeeded in producing several totally black specimens, having kept them for several months in a white basin under ordinary conditions of light. No experiments have yet been made to find out if the black pigment deposited is lost again in darkness.

Kammerer also claimed that eyes became larger when they were kept under alternating red light and daylight. When the skin over the eyes was removed, a specimen with normal eyes was produced. An alternative explanation, that he might have obtained such a specimen from a natural population in this highly variable species, has been advanced. However, Kammerer does not appear to have claimed that Olms with eyes or which had turned black produce young with these characteristics, as some neo-Lamarckists seem to have imagined.

Embed from Getty Images

In a previous post (here) I have described how it was intended to repeat and extend Kammerer’s experiments with Olms at London Zoo in the 1930s under the direction of Ernest W. MacBride, arch-lamarckist, Kammerer’s vicar on earth and a powerful, dogmatic but totally misguided figure in British science during the early decades of the 20th century. He also, incidentally, assumed the role of ‘Master of Ceremonies’ at the Cambridge lecture where it was said, ‘old MacBride’s ridiculous ex-cathedra statements did not help’.

Edward Bles was reported as having found Kammerer ‘absolutely honest’. However, he was clearly not convinced by what he had been told or had seen. After all he did insist that the chair he funded at Cambridge should be named after Darwin.

Bles did not live long enough to see the sad end of Kammerer; he died suddenly on 3 May 1926. Three months later, on 7 August, a letter to Nature by Gladwyn Kingsley Noble (1894 –1940) appeared. It delivered a bombshell: the alleged black nuptial pad of the only specimen of Kammerer’s Midwife Toad that was said to have survived was Indian Ink. Kammerer shot himself and was found dead on an Austrian mountain path on 23 September.

Alphen JJM van, Arntzen JW. 2016. Paul Kammerer and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Contributions to Zoology 85, 457-470.

Gadow H. 1901. Amphibia and Reptiles. The Cambridge Natural History Volume VIII. London: Macmillan

Koestler A. 1971. The Case of the Midwife Toad. London: Hutchinson.

Edward Bles. Part 3. Mr Budgett’s Frogs and an abortive expedition to Paraguay

John Samuel Budgett died, aged 31, on 19 January 1904 of blackwater fever and malaria. He became famous because of his four expeditions to Africa in search of eggs and developing young of the strange fish, Polypterus. There had been all sorts of theories about Polypterus: that it was the ‘missing link’ between fish and amphibia; that it might even been an amphibian. Thomas Henry Huxley had considered it closely related to the the lungfish and the coelacanths, other fish with lobed fins. Eventually Budgett succeeded but did not live to present or publish the results. On the day of his death he was due to give paper to the Zoological Society of London. Polypterus is an ‘early’ finned fish, nowhere near any possible line of descent from fish to amphibian.

Budgett was following the Cambridge tradition established in the 1870s and 80s of using embryology as a tool to unravel evolutionary relationships. An exponent of the Cambridge embryological approach was John Graham Kerr. As a new graduate seeking to work on the lungfish, Lepidosiren, Kerr took Budgett on a collecting expedition in 1896/97 to the Paraguayan Chaco in order to collect material. During their trip Budgett also collected amphibians and reptiles. He found two new species, one of which. Lepidobatrachus laevis, is known as Budgett’s frog.

Budgett collected eggs and tadpoles in Paraguay as well as in Africa during his searches for Polypterus. Before his death he had worked on the development of one species collected in the Chaco. However, he left a great deal of material in Cambridge. At the time of Budgett’s death Kerr had moved from Cambridge to Glasgow, taking Edward Bles with him. Bles started to work on the eggs and tadpoles collected by Budgett both in South America and in Africa. Bles’s words take up the story:

When this material was handed over to me I was much impressed by its interesting character and still further impressed by the novelty of the Engystomid [narrow-mouthed] embryos of Hemisus and, as the series of stages of the last two forms were not extensive, I determined to make an effort to obtain more material and obtained six months leave for a voyage to S. America. I spent almost the whole of the time available—May to August 1905—at San Bernardino on Lake Ipacaraÿ in Paraguay. Unfortunately the winter was most exceptionally cold and there were great floods over immense tracts in Brazil, Paraguay, and the Argentine Republic. Lake Ipacaraÿ had also flooded its shores and my main objects, to collect vertebrate embryological material, were completely defeated. The frogs did not breed during that winter in Paraguay, the only tadpoles found were late hibernating stages. 

The area he chose was where Kerr and Budgett had collected nearly ten years earlier.  The eggs and tadpoles Bles was hoping to collect is now known as Physalaemus biligonigerus, the Four-eyed Weeping Frog. To get to Paraguay he sailed with his wife from Liverpool on 30 March 1905 on the S.S. Oravia heading for Buenos Aires. After what must been an extremely disappointing few months they arrived back in U.K. on 5 August, disembarking at Southampton from the S.S. Danube. Bles had suffered the well-known syndrome of ‘you should have been here last week/month/year; we were falling over them’.

Physalaemus biligonigerus (Raúl Maneyro)
http://calphotos. berkeley.edu

The African species Budgett collected was Hemisus marmoratus, the Marbled Snout-burrower or Pig-nosed Frog or even Shovel-nosed Frog. Bles wrote up the description of the development of both species for a chapter in a memorial volume in honour of Budgett and his achievements compiled and edited by Kerr. Kerr himself completed the Polypterus story. Cambridge University Press published the book in 1907; it was reprinted in 2014.

Hemisus marmoratus (Ryanvanhuysteen)

John Samuel Budgett

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.

Edward Bles (1864-1926). Part 2. Gentleman zoologist. Frogs, plankton, embryos and protozoa

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.

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.