10 ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYOR— DAVENPORT 



Worthington Goldsborough, who reproduced his father's traits as the beloved, unruffled, generous, 

 high-minded country physician. Other members of his fraternity were characterized by a 

 sweet disposition and unselfishness. This Goldsborough family trait of unselfishness Alfred 

 carried into his scientific work, for he readily yielded to others problems toward whose solution 

 he had made some progress, as when he turned over to Prof. H. E. Crampton the studies on 

 Partula he had begun while at the Brooklyn museum. After he wrote a book on Sea-Shore Life 

 he transferred his rights in it to the New York Zoological Society's Aquarium. 



Physical health. — Through Mayor lacked a mother's care in early infancy, he developed 

 into an active, tough, slender, somewhat seclusive lad. Always lithe and active, he seemed to 

 have a wiry constitution. Yet he had certain physical limitations characteristic of his family. 

 One of these was a tendency toward inflammation of the eyes. His mother's sister Amelia had 

 to stay in a dark room for six weeks on account of this trouble, and Alfred suffered an apparently 

 similar breakdown after the cruise of the Wild Duck, on which he was constantly making drawings. 

 The ciliary muscles of the left eye became inflamed and he had to hve for some months in a 

 dark room. He writes characteristically of this period, "my devoted stepmother, who through- 

 out my most hopeless years had not lost faith in me, kept my intellect alive by reading aloud in 

 an adjoining room." (A. G. M., MSS.). 



Through his subsequent main period of activity, from 1895 to 1918, Mayor's output of 

 work indicated a man in the prime of health. In the early spring of 1919 and again in 1920 he 

 went to American Samoa and while there examined the submerged seaward slopes of the coral 

 reefs from a diving hood. Returning to America, he fell ill in the autumn of 1920, and it was 

 later decided that tuberculosis had become active. For nearly two years he fought off the 

 disease, just as his first cousin, Henrietta Lee Goldsborough, did. She eventually recovered, 

 but the outcome was not so happy in his case. Despite a warning that it might be fatal to 

 attempt it, he insisted in coming from Arizona to Dry Tortugas to look after the laboratory 

 in 1922 as he had in 1921. There he rapidly grew worse and died in the water, apparently 

 swooning from weakness while bathing on the beach. 



As Dr. Asa Schaeffer, who was with him at the Tortugas on that last day, well writes: 



As I think of Mayor's great and absorbing devotion to marine biology, his childlike love of the sea, his 

 passion to get away from the conventional, that peculiar ingredient of wierdness in his personality, but particularly 

 the loving care with which he looked after every detail of the laboratory at Tortugas, even to planting the 

 laboratory grounds with Cocoanut palms, Australian pines, the beautiful scarlet Hibiscus and the delicate 

 Spider Lilies — as these things pass through my mind I can not help but feel that there was ascertain appropriate- 

 ness in his saying his last farewell on the shores of beautiful Tortugas. 



