134 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LVI, No. 1440 



eler may advisedly remain an entire year in its 

 wholesome atmosphere while writing his ac- 

 count of an accomplished journey. Can you 

 not see that the school will thus become a nota- 

 ble center o£ geographical activity if its devel- 

 opment follow serious professional lines'? It 

 will inevitably become such a center, and it will 

 thereby exert a gi-eatly needed and most benefi- 

 cent influence on the cultivation of scientific 

 geography all over our country. That the be- 

 ginning now made should have some such con- 

 summation is my devout wish. When that wish 

 is realized, then wherever geography is seriously 

 spoken of in America, the speaker and his 

 hearers wiU find themselves thinking spontane- 

 ously of the Graduate School of Geography at 

 Clark University. 



William Morris Davis 

 Habvaed University 



THE RESEARCHES OF ALFRED 

 GOLDSBOROUGH MAYOR 



Alfred G. Mayor brought to research an 

 unusual personality. He had an extraor- 

 dinary artistic sense both for color and form; 

 he had a training in physics and engineering 

 in accordance with a parental desire; he had 

 the brilliancy in conversation that made him 

 an excellent companion on expeditions or aft«r 

 work hours; he had a capacity for meeting peo- 

 ples of all kinds and conditions — whether in 

 social events in cities or among the natives of 

 the shore of Torres Straits; and he had an 

 industry that outran his strength. 



After graduating from Stevens Institute he 

 went to Clark University as assistant to Pro- 

 fessor Michelson, and then to the University 

 of Kansas where he taught physics for parts 

 of two years. While there he made biophysical 

 studies on leaves, and published the results 

 after going to Harvard. Mayor's artistic sense 

 lured him to study animals. He had as a boy 

 made the most beautiful paintings of butter- 

 flies of iridescent types which looked as 

 though their wings had been pasted on the 

 page. His first research at Harvard was on 

 the development of the wing scales and their 

 pigment in butterflies and moths (1896) and 

 this was quickly followed by a conti'ibution of 



87 pages and 10 (for the most part colored) 

 plates "On the color and pattern of moths and 

 butterflies." These papers revealed three 

 major interests of the author: (a) a fine 

 artistic sense, with a special attraction toward 

 color; (6) a tendency to make crucial experi- 

 ments to test mooted points; and (c) a fond- 

 ness for physical experimentation. Thus he 

 used in these researches the spectix)scope to. 

 study the ijigments and a pendulum to deter- 

 mine the friction of wing scales on the air. 

 In the latter experiment on butterflies the 

 wings were studied with their scales on and 

 also removed. The later paper stimulated 

 Alfred R. Wallace to discuss it in Nature. 



Five years later Mayor published further 

 researches on Lepidoptera and analyzed the 

 elements of their color patterns. He returned 

 again to the Lepidoptera in 1906, when he pub- 

 lished a paper with Miss Soule on some reac- 

 tions of caterpillars and moths. He studied 

 not only their reactions to light, food and 

 gravity and their feeding habits but continued 

 the studies he had begun six years earlier on 

 mate selection. Wings of males were painted 

 with scarlet or green ink; and males were 

 variously maimed. Color made no difference 

 with matings but the maimed males met more 

 resistance than normals to copulation unless 

 the female was blinded. 



Mayor had not been long at the museum in 

 Cambridge before his artistic work attracted 

 the attention of Alexander Agassiz and led to 

 an invitation to him to accompany Agassiz on 

 his trip to the Bahamas in Mr. Forbes' yacht 

 Wild Duck in 1893. This Avas the fu'st of a 

 series of voyages with Agassiz up to 1900; 

 to the Great Barrier Reef of Australia in 

 1896; to the Fiji Islands in 1897-8; to the 

 tropical Pacific on the Albatross in 1899-1900. 

 On these voyages Mayor made di'awings and 

 observations on radiates — especially the Me- 

 dusa. These fascinated him as they did that 

 other artist-naturalist, Haeckel. The outcome 

 of these studies and those of later years ap- 

 peared eventually in Mayor's "Meduste of the 

 World" and "Ctenophores of the Atlantic," 

 published by the Carnegie Institution and 

 illustrated by scores of plates drawn by his 

 own hand and brush. To this period belonged 



