Joan Procter and Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell at London Zoo in the 1920s-30s: A Dissenting Account from Solly Zuckerman

Solly Zuckerman with
monkey. Oxford, 1935
from
Apes to Warlords

I have written several times about Joan Procter, Curator of Reptiles at London Zoo until her death at the age of 34 in 1931, and her relationship with her boss, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell.

All the accounts of Joan Procter’s life and achievements were written by Chalmers Mitchell, that great self-publicist, and it is difficult to assess how others viewed her. All present-day accounts are derived from Mitchell’s various publications but I knew that sometime in the past I had come across a dissenting view. Finally, I remembered that Solly Zuckerman in the first part of his autobiography published in 1978, was the dissenter. Zuckerman, before his meteoric rise to power in British science and a life peerage, had been employed by the Zoological Society of London in 1928-1932 as Prosector—research anatomist in modern parlance—to work on the remains of the animals that died in the Zoo. As well as doing this he built on earlier research he had done in South Africa and wrote his famous book, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes. He later became one of Chalmers Mitchell’s successors as Secretary of the Zoological Society.

This is what Zuckerman had to say on Chalmers Mitchell and Joan Procter:

Joan Procter

The main executive officer of the governing body, which is an elected and unpaid Council, is the Secretary. Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, who occupied that office during the five years when I was a member of the Society’s staff, was not only the Society’s un­questioned ruler, but also a well-known character in the life of London. In his time the secretaryship was a highly paid full-time post, which enjoyed a number of privileges, including a luxurious flat on the upper floor of the Society’s main office. Mitchell ruled his domain with a rod of iron, and while his chief administrator was Dr. Vevers*, he himself seemed to be ruled by Joan Proctor, the Curator of Reptiles, a young woman of powerful personality. Once I was commanded to go to see her in her house near the Zoo. This was an unnerving experience, since she kept as a pet a wild Serval cat, on which I had to keep a wary eye as she spoke. She ordered me to relieve some giant tortoises of the constipation from which she supposed them to be suffering. I did not have the slightest idea what to do but, in my anxiety to get away, said that I would attend to the matter. Later that day I joked about my impending task with Malcolm Pearson, a medical student friend. Malcolm had a nice sense of humour, and after we had discussed the matter, I sent a message to Joan Proctor’s staff to have the affected animals strung up in tennis nets by 9 o’clock the next morning, and to have pails of soapy water and syringes prepared for a visit which I and another doctor would be making. There was no need for any enemas by the time we arrived. Excitement alone had done the trick, and the centre of the new Reptile House was a terrible mess. Apart from asking me to give anti-venom serum to a keeper who had got himself bitten by a snake, Joan Proctor never bothered me again. Malcolm and I dined out more than once on the story.

Peter Chalmers Mitchell

Chalmers Mitchell was not the only member of the Society’s Council who had fallen under Joan Proctor’s spell, and when she died in 1931 at the early age of 34, a medal, one side of which bore her likeness, was struck in her honour. The intention was that it should be presented each year to a distinguished expert on reptiles, but I can find no record that it was ever awarded. Perhaps she was not sufficiently outstanding scientifically to be commemorated in this way. The one copy of the medal that I know still exists is among the Society’s memorabilia. 

I think we can take it that Zuckerman was not overly impressed by Miss Procter. Read my earlier article Joan Procter and Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell. Scandalous Rumours at London Zoo and Whipsnade in the 1920s and try to decide if Zuckerman’s account helps us decipher what was going on.

*Geoffrey Marr Vevers (1890-1970). Not to be confused with his son, Henry Gwynne Vevers (1916-1988).

Mitchell PC. 1929. Centenary History of the Zoological Society of London. London: Zoological Society of London

Zuckerman S. 1978. From Apes to Warlords. London: Hamish Hamilton

Doflein’s Salamander

Some salamanders are very strange beasts. None more so than the tropical Central American species in the genus Bolitoglossa. They can shoot their tongues to catch prey like a chameleon, they can shed their tail when threatened just like many lizards, and they breed entirely on land. They belong to the group of salamanders—the Plethodontidae—that have no lungs, relying on gaseous exchange through the skin. The bolitoglossines are sometimes called climbing salamanders because they can and do live in trees and shrubs, a fact difficult to accept when seeing one for the first time since they not only have webbed feet but appear stiff and ungainly. But the fleshy, webbed feet are deceptive. When planted on a leaf and arched they act as suction cups.

I was barely aware of the existence of these salamanders in the years I first became interested in reptiles and amphibians. They do not get a mention in the popular books available in the 1950s and 60s in Britain that were written by Doris M Cochran or Robert Mertens.

About 30 years ago, I was given a few to keep by whom I cannot remember and my records have disappeared. Individuals of one species were beginning to appear on animal dealers’ lists. That species was Bolitoglossa dofleini from Guatemala, Honduras and Belize. At the time there was no commonly used name. Now IUCN list the following: Alta Verapaz Salamander, Doflein's Mushroomtongue Salamander, Doflein's Salamander, Palm Salamander. It was first described and named by Franz Werner (1867-1939) after Franz Theodor Doflein (1873-1924) who collected the salamander on an expedition to Central America in 1898.

Doflein's Salamander
One of the ones I tried to keep 30 years ago

     

Only years later did I learn that my experience of trying to keep this species was the same as everybody else’s. They appeared to live and feed perfectly well but after a few weeks or months they became lethargic, shed their tails and died. I was annoyed and puzzled that I was unable to keep animals that initially had appeared fit and healthy. Had I got something wrong or did they have some disease that developed with time?

In 2004 a note appeared in Veterinary Record. The authors made the general observation that B. dofleini ‘is generally considered notoriously difficult to keep alive; most imported animals do not survive beyond the first two months after importation’. Three males and two females, recently imported into Belgium, became anorexic and apathetic over a one- to two-week period. Then the hands and feet appeared slightly swollen and began to point upwards. Finally, the tail was shed and the salamanders died 2 to 10 days later.

At this time there was growing realisation that the chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, was having devastating effects on amphibian species throughout the world. The authors of the paper found large numbers of chytrid cells in the cornified layer of the skin all over the body. The origin of the infection could not be determined because the salamanders could have been in contact with other animals in transit to Europe or in the dealer’s premises from which they were obtained.

The suggestion the authors made was that proliferation of the chytrid in the skin might have compromised gaseous exchange in these lungless amphibians. Kidney damage in the form of hyaline droplets was also present but whether this was related to the presence of chytrid was not known. A strange finding in three of the animals was the impaction of the stomach with moss and wooden particles.

I remained puzzled after reading the report in Veterinary Record. While clearly demonstrating the presence of chytridiomycosis, I really could not decide if the animals had died OF or WITH the disease.

Around 1990 the only information I could find indicated that Doflein’s Salamander was found in lowland rainforest. I therefore kept them at temperatures appropriate to that low altitude in Central America. However, I began to wonder if the temperature was too high. Later publications showed an altitude range of 50-1500 metres in the wild including premontane to lower montane wet forest. I did not know where the ones I was given had been collected but if they were from, say, an altitude of 1000 metres, I should have tried keeping them 10°C below that of my simulated lowland tropical environment. I have found suggestions in online fora that people attempting to keep and breed these fascinating amphibians had also tried too high a temperature. In this respect, I read there has been controversy in the past over the altitudinal distribution of the largest of the bolitoglossine salamanders, e.g. B. dofleini, that rely on oxygen uptake through the skin. One view was that large lungless salamanders can only occur at relatively high altitude because the oxygen requirements of the tissues at the higher temperatures of lower altitudes cannot be supplied by the relatively small surface area of the skin. Others have contested that view. However, cutaneous oxygen uptake compromised by the presence of chytrid together with a high environmental temperature in captivity might just have created the perfect patho-physiological storm. 

I discovered that from their size the salamanders given to me must all have been females; males are much smaller. Collectors apparently searched the leaf litter and because the females tend to live there while the males prefer to clamber in the trees and bushes it was mostly females that were imported into Europe.

The only success at keeping B. dofleini I have come across is at Fort Worth Zoo. It was reported in 2012 that ten (all females) had been kept for 6 years. On arrival, all had been treated for chytridiomycosis. I have not seen any reference to the environmental temperature in their exhibit. I have been unable to find in the various papers, whether or not those exported for research have been kept successfully for any length of time.

Fortunately, no licences are now issued for the collection of any species of Bolitoglossa (which occur in Central and the north of South America). B. dofleini takes 10-12 years to reach sexual maturity. Thus a breeding population could, by uncontrolled collection of adults, be reduced to dangerously low levels very quickly. IUCN classify the species as Near Threatened.

It does, though, concern me that nobody has a method for breeding any species of Bolitoglossa in captivity—or at least if they have, nothing seems to have been published. The radiation in these salamanders has been so great that they represent 40% of all the tailed amphibians of the world. If—perish the thought—a captive-breeding programme became necessary to ‘lifeboat’ a conservationally important species, there would be very little background knowledge with which to start.

The only consolation of my experience with Herr Doflein’s Salamander was that I did get to see but not to record the remarkable tongue in action. It can be projected up to 31% of body-length in that species in under 20 milliseconds. The maximum velocity achieved was 7 metres per second and  the maximum acceleration 4500 metres per second per second. In other words the sticky tongue hits the prey at a speed of 25 km per hour, less than 0.02 seconds after launch. The performance of the paired tongue projector muscles ‘exceeds the greatest maximum instantaneous power output of vertebrate muscle by more than an order of magnitude’. 

Here is the video made by Stephen Deban, one of the authors of the paper on the high-power tongue projection in another species of Bolitoglossa, B. franklini:

Deban SM, O’Reilly JC, Dicke U, van Leeuwen JL. 2007. Extremely high-power tongue projection in plethodontid salamanders. Journal of Experimental Biology 210, 655-667. doi:10.1242/jeb.02664 

Feder ME, Papenfuss TJ, Wake DB. 1982. Body size and elevation in neotropical salamanders. Copeia 1982, 186-188.

Pasmans F, Zwart P, Hyatt AD. 2004. Chytridiomycosis in the CentraI American bolitoglossine salamander (Bolitoglossus [sic] dofleini). Veterinary Record 153, 153.

Scales JA, O’Donnell MK, Deban SM. 2017. Thermal sensitivity of motor control of muscle-powered versus elastically powered tongue projection in salamanders. Journal of Experimental Biology 220, 938-951. doi:10.1242/jeb.145896 

Wake DB, Dresner IG. 1967. Functional morphology and evolution of tail autotomy in salamanders, Journal of Morphology 122, 265-306.

Clifford Emmens: Aquarist, Endocrinologist and the Natural History of Bombing

Clifford Walter Emmens
(from Biographical Memoir, AAS)

To anybody keeping and breeding tropical fish from the 1950s until the 1990s, the name C.W. Emmens would have been familiar as the author of a number of the better books on the subject. Few amateur aquarists would have realised that Emmens was professor of veterinary physiology in the University of Sydney and even fewer that he had an important rôle in one of the key developments of the Second World War.

Clifford Walter Emmens (1913-1999) was a member of Solly (later Lord) Zuckerman’s famous Oxford unit studying the effect of bombing on the civilian population. From studies on damage to industrial effectiveness and civilian morale after German attacks on British cities, Zuckerman and his team turned their conclusions around to consider what Allied attacks on German cities would achieve. The conclusion—very little—was anathema to the 'Air Barons' in the Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Force (the latter being desperate to become independent of the army) who had convinced themselves as well as powerful figures in and around Winston Churchill that Germany could be brought to submission by ‘strategic’, in other words, area-bombing. The story is now well known even though Zuckerman exposed later attempts to whitewash the failings of the senior officers of Bomber Command in reports and official histories. Throughout of course there had been the snide comments of the ‘what do a bunch of biologists think they can tell us about air warfare’ type, a view even promulgated by Churchill’s personal friend and scientific adviser, the physicist, Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell, who was a firm believer in strategic bombing—an example of the many things he got completely wrong.

Emmen’s job in Zuckerman’s unit and how be escaped the National Institute of Medical Research in order to take a more active rôle in the war effort is told in his biographical memoir for the Australian Academy of Science and by Zuckerman in the first part of his autobiography.

After tackling the problem of assessing the effect of bombing on the civilian population in Germany, Emmens joined Zuckerman and other members of the unit for bombing surveys after the invasion of Sicily. This detailed work informed the bombing plans for the run-up to the D-Day landings in June 1944. Those plans resulted in the now well-known confrontations with ‘Bomber’ Harris and his acolytes of Bomber Command—and with Lindemann—on using the heavy bombers to destroy rail communication hubs and their associated repair shops, rather than for attacking the ‘strategic’ targets by area-bombing German cities which Harris et al. believed would lead to the capitulation of the enemy. Zuckerman’s prediction based on results of the bombing surveys that such disruption to the movement of men and materiél was the way to success received the solid support of Arthur Tedder with whom Zuckerman had worked closely in the Mediterranean and who was by then Deputy Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Tedder, in turn, convinced Eisenhower, the supremo of the Expeditionary Force.

Emmens was then involved in the analysis of bombing in support of the breakout from Normandy and the advance through France into Germany. One job, assigned to him by Zuckerman, was to assess the destruction of the bridges over the River Seine in impeding the escape of German forces from the Falaise Pocket. ‘Bridge interdiction’ was in favour, particularly by the U.S. Army Air Force, arguing that it would reduce troop and supply movements drastically. Zuckerman and his team were not convinced. With USAAF and RAF Bomber Command represented in Emmens’s small team, they found, after considerable work, that 90% of vehicles, 70% of tanks and at least 95% of the men who reached the Seine succeeded in crossing the river, despite the blown bridges.

Emmens was in charge of the post-war survey of town bombing—as a member of the newly named British Bombing Survey Unit. By then it was possible to compare the various estimates of the effects of the bombing on German cities, estimates including those made by Bomber Command, the scientists acting on the results of the surveys, as well as the real information from German sources. As his biography reports:

According to Emmens, the scientists came out of it very well and were nearer to the truth than any others, whose estimates were in general excessive. He was in charge of the survey of town bombing, which made it clear that until the chaos in Germany right at the end of the war, the Allied offensive had had little effect on either morale or production. Concentration on communications or fuel at an earlier stage would have been much more useful. At the start of the war, towns were about all that could be hit but, according to Emmens, rigorous training for greater accuracy and a switch to other targets should have followed.

Emmens (front row left). From Zuckerman 1978
Although civilians, members of the survey were given honorary commissions in the Royal Air Force

From the Natural History of Bombing and the heart of the scientific analysis of military operations, Emmens returned to the National Institute of Medical Research. His statistical nous was such that he became involved in a number of activities that used those talents in addition to working on deep-freezing spermatozoa with Alan (later Sir Alan) Parkes. Emmens had first got a job in Parkes’s laboratory in 1937. He had graduated in Zoology with Physiology as a subsidiary subject (having swapped Agriculture at Wye College for Zoology at University College London. He had then worked as a research student with J.B.S. Haldane on biometry but gave up that studentship when he was offered a permanent job with Parkes. His job was to establish biological assays for human sex steroids and gonadotrophins, biological assays because no other methods were available for these substances, often of unknown chemical composition, at the very low concentrations present in blood and urine. Defining the dose or concentration of a hormone by its biological activity was essential and required considerable statistical input. Emmens, in the then burgeoning field of endocrinology, also began work on the biological effects of oestrogens.

In 1947, Emmens was invited to join the new department of veterinary physiology in the University of Sydney. He accepted and sailed for Australia in March 1948 with his wife and family.

From Centaur (Journal of the Sydney University Veterinary Society) 1948

In Sydney, he had a hard time from some members of the veterinary profession in the vet school: ‘Emmens was not a vet, was not a blood and guts physiologist, was not even a physiologist’. So entrenched in view were these vets—echoing it has to be said their counterparts in the U.K.—that I have been told stories of their anti-Emmens antics by former members of staff and by former veterinary students. Many of the latter, I became aware, thought Emmens and his departmental staff from several science disciplines, a breath of fresh air. The research output of his very small department exceeded that of all the rest of the veterinary school.

Emmens was highly active in Australian and international science, continuing for some time his own interests in bioassays and biological standards and in the actions of oestrogens and anti-oestrogenic compounds. He is remembered as always in a hurry, not to suffer fools gladly, and of ‘incandescent temper’. Present-day university ‘managements’, spouting HR platitudes from every orifice, would be horrified—and wrong.

Although his biographers report that he first became interested in pond life at the age of 10. He then started to keep freshwater species while at school and tried to keep marine species collected during family holidays to the coast. It was on his move to Sydney that he began fishkeeping in earnest. He bought a large house by the shore of Sydney Harbour. The basement he filled with over 70 tanks ranging from 20 to 450 litres. As he became successful in keeping and breeding fish* he began writing about them in magazines for aquarists. His first book, published in 1953, was entitled Keeping and Breeding Aquarium Fishes. It was published by Academic Press in New York (not as stated in his biographical memoir). Thereafter his books were published by TFH Publications, owned by the later disgraced and infamous Herbert Axelrod who was sometimes Emmens’s co-author, with an increased number appearing after his retirement from the university. These book covered freshwater and marine aquaria. Axelrod is described as Emmens’s friend by the latter’s biographers. If that was so, then perhaps stories of Axelrod’s dubious business methods and nomenclatural shenanigans over the naming of the Cardinal Tetra, Paracheirodon axelrodi, had not spread from the U.S.A. to Australia.

As far as I can ascertain it was Emmens who suggested in 1958 that ‘lactation’ in Discus fish, where the young feed on a skin secretion produced by the adults, was likely to be controlled by the hormone, prolactin, like milk secretion in mammals and crop ‘milk’ in pigeons. That suggestion was borne out by subsequent experimental work in Japan and Germany.

Clifford Emmens died in Sydney on 18 June 1999. An obituary in Tropical Fish Hobbyist, the magazine then owned by Herbert Axelrod, described Emmens as “scientist, teacher, author, aquarist, judo black belt, ballroom dancer” His biographers considered that ‘an apt summary of this complex and remarkable man. What could have been added is that he was a much respected and admired colleague’.

*For a long time I thought Emmens had been solely concerned with keeping and breeding fishes. However, I found an article he had written for the old Water Life magazine in the UK in 1955. It was on keeping the small Australian frogs (or ‘toadlets’) of the genus Pseudophryne. Some of these species are now classed as ‘critically endangered’ or ‘endangered’. Emmens photographed P. corroboree (the Southern Corroboree Frog) for his article. It is ‘Critically Endangered’ with only tens of adults being recorded now being recorded in the wild.

Stone GM, Wales RG. 2004. Clifford Walter Emmens, 1913-1999. Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.15, no.1, 2004 (see here for the version as a biographical memoir).

Zuckerman S. 1978. From Apes to Warlords. London: Hamish Hamilton.

To observe wild animals..without at the same time gaining the impression, somewhat prevalent today, that watching animals in the wild constitutes 'high' science. Who said that?

The full quotation is: 

Climbing in the country provided ample opportunities to observe baboons and other wild animals, without at the same time gaining the impression, somewhat prevalent today, that watching animals in the wild constitutes 'high' science.

From Lord Solly Zuckerman's biography, From Apes to Warlords, Hamish Hamilton, 1978, page 7, describing his schooldays in South Africa.

But who, in the 1970s, was Zuckerman having a go at? My guess is the then up-and-coming primatologists like Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey.

Non-genetic Inheritance, the Dutch Famine of 1944-45 and Operation Market Garden: Antony Beevor’s book 'Arnhem'

It is not often I get the chance to write a science article combined with a book review.

I have used the Dutch Famine in the winter of 1944-45 to illustrate talks on intergenerational maternal effects* for the past twenty-five years. For those unaware of this tragic ‘natural’ experiment, individuals who were in utero during the famine were found to be at increased risk of metabolic and cardiovascular disease when adult and of cognitive decline with age. The important finding was that these conditions were also more prevalent in the next generation—the children of those children who were first affected.

Inheritance other than through maternal and paternal genes is now the hot topic of epigenetics. However, there are all sorts of possible mechanisms by which these effects may work. I use epigenetic in the wide sense of any non-genetic effect of mother or father on the phenotype of their offspring. Unfortunately, the molecular geneticists have defined the term more narrowly to mean an effect on the chromosomes, i.e. by activating or deactivating the genes. Confusion therefore abounds and we can have an epigenetic effect in the widest sense that is not an epigenetic effect in the narrowest. 

Research on the intergenerational effects of the Dutch Famine continues. The mechanism or mechanisms of the epigenetic, in the wide sense, effect(s) remains controversial but the important point here is that the phenomenon itself—long-term deleterious effects on the health of individuals one or more generations down the line from those originally affected, is a solid observation and one that has from tragic circumstances provided vital insights into the developmental origins of health and disease.

Given the importance of the Dutch Famine to the biological word I was surprised when I read Antony Beevor’s book, Arnhem, late last year that while he described the appalling suffering and bravery of the civilian population of the Netherlands after Operation Market Garden in September 1944, the long-term effects of the Dutch Famine only made a footnote and then only in relation to the incidence of schizophrenia in girls born to women who were pregnant during the famine, along with an inaccurate interpretation of the results of eating tulip bulbs or wheat in relation to coeliac disease.

The Famine came after the failed Arnhem Campaign and a railway strike in support of the Allied effort as a direct result of military action and deliberate retaliation by the German occupiers on the civilian population. Rations in the western region of the Netherlands, including Amsterdam, were reduced to over the months to reach a low of between less than a quarter to about one-third of the required energy intake per day. Deaths caused directly by under-nutrition were estimated as 18,000. In the late stages, a deal between the German occupiers and Allied Forces was done which allowed air drops of food by the Royal Air Force, Royal Canadian Air Force and U.S. Army Air Force in return for not bombing German positions. Proper relief and recovery only came after the Germans surrendered in the west on 4 May 1945.

I learnt a lot from Beevor’s book, the effectiveness of the Nottinghamshire Yeomanry (Sherwood Rangers) and the success of the British Firefly tank (a British 17-pounder anti-tank gun mounted in the turret of an American Sherman tank), for example. Beevor, as other have in the past, comes down heavily on the British generals and air marshals and their staffs involved in planning and executing Operation Market Garden—the daring bid to get into northern Germany by crossing the Rhine and thus bringing an early end to the War. The Americans also wanted to see their airborne forces used, almost come what may. Landing zones chosen by Royal Air Force planners were too far away from the vital bridges but the planners were not over-ruled. There was simply no slack in what was an already inadequate but ambitious plan. Every aspect had to go well and to time. But it didn’t. Beevor has nothing really new to say here but every work on Arnhem brings forth a barrage of criticism from those armchair generals who think Montgomery could do no wrong followed by a counter-blast from those who think the field-marshal could do no right.

Strategic failure though should cast no shadow over the often brilliant military tactics employed by units and individuals in the field and it is this aspect that Beevor captures in his account of Operation Market (the air-drop to take the bridges including the final one at Arnhem) and of Operation Garden (the race by land forces to reach those dropped by air). However, the book suffers from a dearth of maps. There are maps but many more are needed, containing all the place-names mentioned in the text, in order for the narrative to flow. I have noticed that professional historians seems loathe to illustrate books and talks as part of the narrative. They seem to prefer to rely on the written or spoken word with a few illustrations thrown in at the end. With complicated stories of simultaneous actions in an operation like Market Garden, the reader can easily be confused about what is happening to whom and where. This is where a good book editor, playing the part of the average reader, is essential to inject a greater degree of clarity.

*’where the mother makes a contribution to the phenotype of her progeny over and above that which results from the genes she contributes to the zygote’.

Beevor A. 2018. Arnhem. The Battle for the Bridges, 1944. Viking.

Frederic Wood Jones. Acerbic anatomist and those who came after him

Frederic Wood Jones
from
Biographical Memoir

In my article on Chapman Pincher and the evolution of the giraffe (1 December 2019) I wrote:

Frederic Wood Jones FRS (1879-1954), a classical anatomist, who had worked on all sorts of biological problems and phenomena from the formation of coral reefs to the lesions caused by judicial hanging, with very strange views on evolution and the value of genetics, wrote to the editor in reply to Pincher. Wood Jones pointed out that he and Robert Broom FRS (1866-1951)—the famous primate palaeontologist and anatomist also possessed of very strange views on evolution by ‘spiritual agencies’—had come up with the same idea as Pincher.

The job of writing Wood Jones’s biographical memoir for the Royal Society fell to Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark (1895-1971). Wood Jones had along with Arthur Keith FRS (1866-1955) and Grafton Elliot Smith FRS (1871-1937) inspired Le Gros Clark’s interest in primates and physical anthropology. However, none of the three escaped criticism by their pupil. Lord Solly Zuckerman (1904-1993) noted in his biographical memoir on Le Gros Clark that, in the biographical memoir on Wood Jones, Le Gros Clark had written:

Wood Jones he described as a man who ‘carried his arguments too far and sometimes rather seriously overstated the evidence on which he relied . . .’, as a man who was guilty of ‘needlessly caustic dis­paragement of some of the great biologists of past days’, and as one who was astute in controversy and intolerant of those who disagreed with him. 

But Le Gros Clark had gone much further than in Zuckerman’s examples. Thus:

He was obviously impressed with the precision and. detail of functional adaptations in the animal world, as pre­sumably all zoologists are. But, unlike zoologists in general, he allowed him­self to be so overwhelmed with this outstanding characteristic of living organisms that he was content to ascribe all adaptations to an obscure and undefined kind of directive force, and simply to leave it at that. There was, indeed, a distinct element of mysticism in his attitude to some of the fundamental problems of organic life and, as a result, his more popular writings aroused considerable response from the class of general reader to whom the methods and philosophy of science make little appeal. 

He ended:

A man of restless curiosity and of strong opinions, he sometimes gave an appearance of intolerance towards those who disagreed with him. He was also very critical of the development of new technical methods in anatomical research, even going so far as to imply that any method but that of scalpel and forceps (and perhaps the low power of the microscope) was beyond the proper domain of the science of anatomy. It is little wonder, therefore, that he was out of sympathy with the younger generation of anatomists; so much so, indeed, that he occasionaly [sic] allowed himself to be almost too brusque in his attitude towards them and their work. But although he was possessed of a certain natural acerbity of temperament which impelled him to express his views in somewhat unaccommodating terms, Wood Jones certainly contributed his full share (and more) to the store of comparative anatomical knowledge, and the stimulus which he gave to his students and contemporaries by his lectures and writings can hardly be exaggerated. 

I think it is worth pointing out that Wood Jones, Keith, Elliot Smith and Zuckerman (who, in turn, was critical of Le Gros Clark) came into the biological sciences through medicine. They were all professors of anatomy and clearly ill-equipped in that intellectual tradition, like, sadly, many biomedical scientists of today, to have much worth saying on the mechanisms of evolution or of the importance of the role of evolution in shaping biological systems. The zoologists and geneticists did that. Wood Jones was a man of his tradition and his time.

Le Gros Clark W. 1955. Frederic Wood Jones 1879-1954. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1, 119-134.

Zuckerman S. 1973. Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark 1895-1971. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 19, 217-233.

The Curious Case of Climbing Newts

My eye was drawn to a post in the UK Amphibian and Reptile Groups Discussion Forum on Facebook which reported that as many as 50 Palmate Newts (Lissotriton helveticus) were found in reeds and low vegetation as high a three feet—nearly a metre—from the ground. Various comments followed as to why they may have been doing that when their breeding pond was close by. One of the comments was from Henrik Bringsøe in Denmark pointing out that he had written a paper on similar behaviour he and others had observed in the Smooth or Common Newt these days known as Lissotriton vulgaris, rather than the Triturus vulgaris we grew up with.

Bringsøe reported newts being found on the trunks of trees, on leaves and branches in vegetation about 40-50 cm above the ground and on the top of dead rushes at the edge of a pond. One was found 180 cm above the ground on the branch of an alder. Another, which was possibly attracted to invertebrates around a lamp, was found at a height of 2 metres on the wall of a house.

From Bringsøe, 2013

An obvious question is why this phenomenon has been so rarely observed. I could find no mention in either of the old standard books on British amphibians and reptiles, Smith and Frazer. Has it simply been missed or not reported?

There are all sorts of possible explanations for this little-reported climbing behaviour by amphibians which seem so ill-equipped for any sort of arboreal life. Indeed, there may be more than one reason with seeking food on vertical surfaces an obvious example. One suggestion that has not previously been raised might pertain to the climbing into vegetation near breeding ponds. Newts—both males and females—are known to use pheromones in courtship in their breeding ponds. Could it be that they are using an elevated position to ensure pheromones are further and more widely distributed in the surrounding air currents rather than relying on short-range diffusion close to the ground? Importuning—I’m here, come and get me’—could be what some of the climbing newts are up to, the unpaired ones climbing into reeds and shrubs to advertise their presence. 

Bringsøe H. 2013. Height-seeking habits of the Smooth Newt, Lissotriton vulgaris – a neglected behavioural trait. Mertensiella 19, 131-138.

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Frazer. D. 1983. Reptiles and Amphibians in Britain. London:Bloomsbury.

Smith M. 1954. The British Amphibians and Reptiles. Revised Edition. London: Collins