4 ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYOR— DAVENPORT IM " M0,,u, [ ffi& A £ 



ELEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC MAKE-UP 



Fondness for natural, history. — Alfred G. Mayor early showed a great interest in living things. 

 Especially butterflies attracted him. As a boy he collected them and made drawings of theni 

 and painted them in extraordinarily lifelike fashion, so that it seemed hardly possible that the 

 iridescent and shimmering wings had not been pasted on the page. It can not be doubted that 

 there was an unusually acute capacity for color discrimination and sense of form that lay back 

 of all this behavior. The capacity was so great that its exercise was highly successful and gave 

 great satisfaction. There is no doubt, from his own statements made to the writer, that from 

 an early age there was nothing else gave so keen a delight as animals of striking form and color. 

 And just this capacity of discrimination guided his pen and brush and made him an animal 

 artist of high quality. In his autobiographical notes he stresses a certain love of solitude in his 

 boyhood as contributing to his contact with nature. 



I threw myself heart and soul into a world of the imagination wherein I lived apart from man, and sought 

 my playmates among the creatures of the woods and fields. I literally loved individual butterflies I had raised 

 from early larval stages, and exulted in their imagined joy as they flew from my hand to flutter over the clover- 

 laden fields. Only when sorely needed for specimens in my collections did I force myself to kill the beautiful 

 creatures which seemed so wholly to accord with the world of flowers and sunshine I myself adored. 



Even at Bethlehem, when not more than three years old, I remember being held spellbound by the opera- 

 tions of w r asps building their nest in the window shutter of my nursery. ... I also pondered over the reason 

 for the roundness and smoothness of the white pebbles that formed the paths around my father's house. The 

 frog pond was a universe of waters; but the climax came when a blue-purple butterfly (Basilarchea Ursula) 

 flitting in the sunlight filled my little mind with such rapture of delight that I must needs run to my beautiful 

 old grandmother only to learn the miraculous fact that "butterflies come from caterpillars." 



He lived at South Orange and Maplewood, N. J., from 1S74 to 1889. He continues: 



Day after day throughout the summer I wandered forth, butterfly net in hand, and before my teens were 

 passed I had reared, and made colored drawings of, nearly every species of butterfly and many of the moths 

 known from this region. 



This intense interest in the beauties of natural form and color was found also in his father, 

 who at an early age "plunged into the pursuit of all things scientific, from collections of insects 

 to the study of the stars" (Mayer and Woodward, 1916). Later in life A. M. Mayer edited 

 books on sport, including articles on fish and game birds. Of his mother it is stated that she 

 was fond of all nature, and so must have been her father, who lived in the country, farmed and 

 enjoyed g unnin g, and her mother, whose special interest was in her flower garden and in trees. 



A. G. Mayor's love of organisms was thus keen and lasting. While his father required him 

 to go through an engineering school, he says: 



Almost every spare hour of my college years was given to natural history; and hundreds of colored drawings 

 of turtles, snakes, newts, frogs, and insects had resulted from these charmed hours of exultation. (A. G. M., MSS.) 



The three years employed in teaching physics were painful to him, and he was in an 

 "ecstacy of delight and hope" when he entered the zoological laboratory at Harvard University 

 to be started upon that professional career as a zoologist, in fidelity to which he never wavered. 



Ability in animal painting and interest in color. — As stated in his autobiography, Mayor 

 desired to record permanently the beauties of the animals whose form and color so moved him. 

 The faithfulness of his reproductions was uncanny, and it was this ability that brought Agassiz's 

 suggestion that he make colored drawings of the jellyfishes. This he did for many years, and 

 these paintings are reproduced in color in Mayer's Medusae of the World, in three volumes, of 

 which he modestly says: 



It has always been a sorrow to me that when (they) were finally published in 1910 Dr. Agassiz had passed 

 away, and he had declined to permit his name to be associated with the work, which was in truth the fruit of his 

 inspiration." (A. G. M., MSS.) 



Other applications of physics, chemistry, and mathematics to otology. — Af ter Mayor's appoint- 

 ment as director of the marine laboratory of the Carnegie Institution it was natural for him to 

 continue his studies of the beautiful jellyfishes. Their pulsation had long interested him, and he 

 sought to get light on its causes. He entered upon this novel research with much enthusiasm, and 



