A Collectors 

 Tale 



by Alan Solem, Curator of Invertebrates 



photos by the author 



Leslie Hubricht at home 



M 



22 



Leridian, Mississippi is home for the current Miss 

 America, Susan Akin; site of the Jimmie Rodgers 

 (Father of Country Music, The Singing Brakeman) 

 Museum; and, in a comfortable, well shaded house on a 

 quiet street, location of a unique biological collection. 

 This national treasure has been built by a remarkable 

 individual, Leslie Hubricht — collector for 57 years, 

 publishing scientist for 51 years, and world authority on 

 the land snails of the Eastern United States. 



For 46 years he has interacted with staff scientists at 

 Field Museum of Natural History. 



The 500,000 land snail specimens amassed by Les- 

 lie Hubricht exceed the materials now in the combined 

 collections of major United States museums, form an 

 irreplaceable record of what species lived where at stages 

 during the twentieth-century destruction of eastern for- 

 ests by agriculture and lumbering, provide benchmark 

 data concerning repopulation of snail faunas in park 

 areas, and thus are a treasure trove of data for students 

 and scientists in the centuries to come. 



Land snails are sensitive indicators of ecological 

 change, locally extinguished by clear-cutting or grazing 

 by stock, preserved in steep ravines and fenced wood- 

 lots. His collections are the major documentation of 

 what lived where in the Eastern United States during the 

 mid-twentieth century. As such, they will be of im- 

 mense value to ecologists, systematists, environmental- 

 ists, and biogeographers of the future. 



Field Museum's cooperation with Leslie Hubricht 



dates back to 1940, essentially spanning the curatorial 

 careers of Fritz Haas (1938-1965) and Alan Solem (1956 

 to date). At first the cooperation was one-way. Hubricht 

 donated duplicate specimens to help start our mollusk 

 collection. Later he gave us all of his bulky freshwater 

 unionid clams, principally from the Ozarks, as his inter- 

 est focused more and more on land snails and the cost 

 of moving his growing collection from city to city 

 mounted. Since Fritz Haas's primary interest was in the 

 unionid freshwater clams, this initial thrust of coopera- 

 tion was of major significance to Field Museum. 



Starting in 1960, we could reciprocate. As 

 Hubricht discovered more and more new species, Field 

 Museum staff prepared illustrations of type specimens for 

 him and provided a permanent home for these name- 

 bearing examples. A stream of optical photographs, 

 drawings, and scanning electron microscope photo- 

 graphs flowed out shortly after the specimens came in. 

 Our type collection increased, and Hubricht's bibliog- 

 raphy mounted towards its current 147 publications. 



The classic modern account of the land snails of the 

 Eastern United States, Henry A. Pilsbry's Land Mollusca 

 of North America (North of Mexico), published by the 

 Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia from 1939 

 to 1948, became increasingly outdated, mainly as a re- 

 sult of Hubricht's collecting and publishing. Initially as 

 an aid to his own collecting sallies, Hubricht had plotted 

 county records for each species on separate outline maps. 

 This was started when the second part of Pilsbry's man- 



