6 ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYOR— DAVENPORT CMBM0IM [ $ > uxxt 



per second is expressed in a formula known as Mayer's law. Mayor applied his facility in 

 mathematics, especially trigonometry, in his little text-book on Navigation, prepared during 

 the World War. 



Mayor's interest in color, even apart from form, is well illustrated in his paper "On the 

 color and color patterns of moths and Lepidoptera" — one of his earliest researches at Harvard. 

 In Plates 6 to 8 of this paper are representations of the color areas of butterflies drawn in a 

 sort of "Mercator's projection" of the wing, which made homologous areas comparable but 

 distorted the pattern of the whole, so as to elicit a strong protest from Alfred R. Wallace, in 

 "Nature," to the effect that the essential significance of the color areas as mimetic, or protective, 

 was lost. Wallace missed the point, namely, that any mimetic pattern is, after all, limited 

 by the physiological developmental capacities of the organism. In this research color itself 

 became a special object of investigation. The relative frequency of the different kinds of 

 colors was plotted; the pigment colors were quantitatively expressed by means of Maxwell's 

 disks and analyzed spectroscopically by a special apparatus. Here Mayor's physical training 

 again stood him in good stead. While he reacted strongly against physics as a subject of 

 research (doubtless because it once threatened to oppose his main interests), yet he readily 

 applied physics to biology. Had he become a physicist he would probably have become a 

 student of light and color, subjects which his versatile father took up again and again. It 

 may be added that Mayor returned to the topic of color and color patterns in Lepidoptera 

 repeatedly. His doctor's thesis considered the development of pigment in the wing; he for- 

 mulated a new (and most valuble) hypothesis of seasonal dimorphism in color; he gave a Woods 

 Hole lecture on the development of color in Lepidoptera; he discussed the value of color in the 

 mating of these insects; in 1902 he published an extensive research on natural selection versus 

 race tendency in relation to the color patterns; in 1906 he published results of experiments on 

 the reactions of caterpillars and moths. Mayor's interest in the great "color-display" group 

 of insects lasted long into the period when other interests had become strong. 



Marine worlc and travels. — Mayor is best known for his work on marine organisms, which 

 opened up an important part of the field of thallassography. He was 24 years of age before 

 he first visited the seashore to do biological work. This was at Mr. Agassiz's laboratory at 

 Newport. Thus he came to be associated with one of the world's leading thallassographers, 

 and this gave Mayor an opportunity to discover his hereditary fondness for the sea. While 

 curator of the Brooklyn museum he undertook various marine expeditions. As the Tortugas 

 laboratory was usually open only from AprU to August, Mayor had time to make expeditions 

 to other parts of the world; thus, in 1907-8, to Cornwall, England, and to the Naples station. 

 In 1913 Murray Island and also Papua were visited with a party which circumnavigated the 

 globe. 



"The greater number of the West Indian islands were visited in 1912-16 with a view to 

 selecting a site for a permanent laboratory, the work of which might in some measure serve 

 to continue that of the Naples station, which had suffered sadly through the World War. Special 

 expeditions were made also to Kingston, Montego Bay, Jamaica, Guanica, Porto Rico, Pigeon 

 Point, Tobago, and Andus Island, Bahamas," and in 1917 and again in the winter of 1918 

 voyages were undertaken to Tutuila, Samoa, to study the problems of coral reefs and the growth 

 rate of corals in the Pacific. It is probable that no other biologist of this epoch has had so 

 extensive as well as detailed acquaintance with all the seas and seashores as Mayor. 



The results of Mayor's researches on coral reefs are described by him as follows: It was 

 found that, generally speaking, those forms which can withstand high temperature are also 

 correspondingly well able to withstand the smothering due to being buried under mud. Hence 

 those corals can live in the shallow reef flats near shore, where the temperature is high and the 

 silt abundant. On the other hand, the corals which must live in relatively cool water are confined 

 to the seaward parts of the reef where they are surrounded by cool water free from sfit. Thus 

 the correlation between temperature reactions and the effects of silt account for the peculiar 

 distribution of the various species of corals over the reef flat. 



