EWAN: SAN FRANCISCO AS A MECCA FOR NINETEENTH CENTURY NATURALISTS 29 



Ferdinand Gruber, the Academy's one-time Curator of Birds. He assisted in the 

 arrangement of the collection of mounted birds at Woodward's Gardens, one of 

 the city's earliest and much-beloved pleasure resorts. The statues and urns that 

 once graced the Gardens may be seen today at Sutro Heights. Gruber invented 

 a rotating tableau of natural history called the "Zoogeographicon," exhibited at 

 the Gardens from 1874 to 1889. Xantus called Gruber "a very excellent taxi- 

 dermist, and [a man] who sells at a very high figure his birds for drawing room 

 ornaments . . . Mr. Gruber is a very honest man, but a very strict commerciante 

 also." It was Gruber who collected birds on the Farallones for Xantus in exchange 

 for skins from Cape San Jose del Cabo, and hereby hangs a tale. Xantus, whose 

 veracity seems to have eroded pretty far on other occasions as well, wished to 

 swell the collection of Cape birds to be sent to Spencer F. Baird at the Smith- 

 sonian, so he took Farallon skins of Tufted Puffin and Pigeon guillemot collected 

 by Gruber and attached labels reading "Sandoval point, 1860" and "Cape Los 

 Martires, 1861" to tliem. These are birds not otherwise known from Lower Cali- 

 fornia and when Joseph Grinnell was preparing his Distributional Summation 

 of the Ornithology of Lower California he remarked, without knowing of the 

 switch perpetrated by Xantus or, indeed, of Xantus' exchange contacts with 

 Gruber, that the skins showed a remarkable resemblance to Gruber's well kno^vn 

 specimens! There are still unsolved problems of this nature, as witness the hawk 

 Onychotes gruheri. It is supposed to have a California origin but is now regarded 

 as a later name for an Hawaiian hawk. Gruber was in touch with Dr. Frick, 

 French Consul General in Honolulu — can this be a clue to the mystery of 

 Onychotes gruheri f 



Dr. Kellogg found a sympathetic colleague in Dr. Arthur Wellesley Saxe, who 

 came to California in 1850 and worked in the mines until 1852. In 1854 he took 

 up residence as practicing physician at Santa Clara, where he lived until his death 

 in 1891, with one visit to the Hawaiian Islands to study leprosy. Dr. Howard A. 

 Kelly says he was President of the California Horticultural Society and had "one 

 of the largest collections of roses and rare bulbs in the state." Dr. Kellogg named 

 Rumex saxei for his friend in 1879, and Professor Greene named Clarkia saxeana 

 in 1887, but Saxe's collections at the Academy, which were perhaps never exten- 

 sive, were lost in the fire of 1906. 



A close friend of Harford at the Academy was George Washington Dunn, 

 who came to California in 1850 and worked in the placer mines. Along with many 

 another miner Dunn left the placers penniless, whereupon he determined to 

 devote his life to professional collecting, which seems to have been his first love 

 all along. Taking up residence in San Diego, he ranged far and wide for speci- 

 mens to sell. He was described as "a genial sort, always on his uppers, who col- 

 lected insects, plants, shells, and anything else he could sell. Like IMicawber, he 

 waited for something to 'turn up'." An acquaintance relates how he would climb a 

 couple of hundred feet up pine trees when he was past eighty, and put lengths of 

 stove pipe on his legs when collecting in rattlesnake-infested areas. He was elected 

 a resident member of the Academy March 16, 1874, and it was at this time that 

 Dunn, along with Harford and some other Academy members, organized the in- 

 formal Arthrozoic Club. He was admitted into the San Francisco almshouse in 

 his ninety-first year but left of his own accord four months later and died the 

 following year. In all, lie made twelve trips to Lower California, including one 



