Editor’s Note – This essay was subsequently published as:
Dillon, R.T., Jr. (2019c) Bryant Walker's sense of fairness. Pp 191 - 198 in The Freshwater Gastropods of North America Volume 3, Essays on the
Prosobranchs. FWGNA Press, Charleston.
Bryant Walker was a lawyer.
It is difficult for us to comprehend, looking back on his distinguished
career in malacology, which extended over 50 years and 155 publications, that
he never held a formal position at any scholarly institution. And that the second word under Walker’s entry
in R. Tucker Abbott’s Directory of American Malacologists [1], after the word
lawyer, is “amateur.”
He was born in Detroit in 1856 and died in Detroit in 1936,
and will ever be linked most closely with his alma mater, the University of
Michigan. Indeed 25 of Walker’s 155
publications were regional surveys – directed toward the molluscan fauna of the
Wolverine State [2]. But he corresponded
widely throughout North America, developing especially close friendships with
Ortmann in Pittsburgh, Pilsbry in Philadelphia, and such prominent collectors
as J. H. Ferriss, A. A. Hinkley, and H. H. Smith. And he became an international authority on
freshwater limpets, publishing important contributions on the ancylids of South
America and Africa, as well as revising our own continental fauna here at home
[3].
According to Calvin Goodrich [4, 5], whom he recruited to the
University of Michigan in 1929, the first entry in Walker’s personal catalog of
shells was “made in the back part of a university notebook on physics” in 1874,
while he was yet an undergraduate. He
published his first paper in the year of his graduation from Michigan with an
A. B. in 1876, and his second paper the year he graduated from the Michigan Law
School in 1879. Thereafter he entered
private practice as an attorney in Detroit, turning his “three-storied, high
ceilinged, mansard-roofed house” into a museum, “the ground floor dedicated to
gastropods, the upper to bivalves.”
Again according to Goodrich, “When the collection was moved in June [of
1936] to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, a great pile of boxed shells
was discovered in the attic rooms, others on shelves in the basement where some
were partly buried under coal.”
Walker’s research interests favored the freshwater
gastropods (56 papers), but did not neglect the unionid mussels (29
papers). In his day he was probably best
known for the “Mollusca” chapter he contributed to the first (1918) edition of
Ward & Whipple’s influential “Freshwater Biology.” He expanded that work into a stand-alone
“Synopsis of the Classification of the Freshwater Mollusca of North America,”
augmented it with “A catalog of the more recently described species, with
notes,” and published it as a 213-page “Miscellaneous Publication” of the
University of Michigan [6].
I keep a reprint of Walker’s 1918 “Miscellaneous Publication”
on the shelf next to my desk, and refer to it often. The work grew from an extensive system of
note cards that he compiled for his personal use over many years, recording
not just the descriptions of new species as they were published, but indeed any
note or comment regarding any species of North American freshwater mollusk to
appear in the literature over several decades.
In cases such as the Physidae, where no monographic treatment was
published between Binney’s of 1865 and George Te’s of 1975, Walker’s
“Miscellaneous Publication” provides an indispensable bridge from the ancient
to the merely old.
Bryant Walker had a lawyer’s sense of fairness. As the 20th century dawned, the
larger and showier freshwater gastropods, such as the lymnaeids, the
planorbids, and especially the pleurocerids, had all received more than their
fair share of attention. Thus he focused
his research efforts on the smaller and plainer taxa – the hydrobiids, the
valvatids, and especially the ancylid limpets.
Among the hydrobiids, the plainest genus is arguably
Somatogyrus, which bears a relatively heavy but otherwise nondescript shell and
a simple penis. All the other hydrobiid
groups – the Amnicolines, the Nymphophilines, the Fontigentines – have an elaborate
penial morphology with accessory lobes and glandular crests and extra ducts and
were already, by Walker’s day, split into scores of regional species. It did not seem fair to Walker that there
should be dozens of species of Amnicola in New England, and hundreds of species
of pleurocerids in Alabama, but just four species of Somatogyrus, simply because
they were so plain.
So in 1904 he described 11 new species of Somatogyrus,
including the regional taxa S. pennsylvanicus, S. virginicus, and S.
georgianus, as well as 8 species from the Mobile Basin of Alabama [7]. And between 1906 and 1915 he described 14 additional species, most from the Tennessee River and its tributaries in North
Alabama [8, 9, 10].
Almost all 25 of these species were, quite plainly speaking,
indistinguishable. Walker described the
shell of Somatogyrus virginicus, for example, as “small, globosely conic, and
imperforate,” and that of S. pennsylvanicus as “small, obtusely conic, narrowly
umbilicate, sometimes imperforate [7].”
The only exception was his Somatogyrus umbilicatus from the Coosa River
of Alabama, about which Walker enthused, “This species is remarkable for its
depressed, valvata-like form and round, deep umbilicus, which readily
differentiates it from all other known species of the genus.”
By 1909 it was beginning to seem unfair to Walker that the
genus Somatogyrus should include 21 indistinguishable species (by that point, see note 11) and one that
looked different. So he removed his S.
umbilicatus to a separate genus, Clappia, and redescribed it as Clappia clappi,
to doubly-ingratiate himself with G. H. Clapp, then curator of mollusks at
Harvard’s MCZ [Plate above, see ref 9]. The genus remains
valid to this day, although the specific nomen “clappi” was dead aborning [12].
It was Calvin Goodrich’s opinion, however, that Walker’s 25
papers on the Ancylidae “will probably stand as his best work.” While essentially all of the 16 species-level
ancylid taxa he described from North American waters have now disappeared into
synonymy [13], Walker's genera Ferrissia, Laevapex, and Rhodacmea survive to
this day, albeit with approximately one species each [14].
But with the advantage of 100 years’ perspective, I would
suggest that Bryant Walker’s best work was “Malacology at the University of
Michigan.” If there was any interest in
mollusks at Ann Arbor prior to Walker, I can find no evidence of it [15]. But after Walker came Goodrich [5], and after
Goodrich came van der Schalie, and under van der Schalie trained W. J. Clench,
A. R. Solem, P. F. Basch, J. B. Burch, W. H. Heard, and many, many others,
including (full disclosure) my own Ph.D. advisor, G. M. Davis.
Absent the Malacology Department at the UMMZ, the landscape
of our discipline in America today would present a far more desolate
aspect. Although I have never seen him
accorded the honor, let’s bestow upon Mr. Bryant Walker, lawyer, amateur, the
title “Father of Malacology at Michigan,” shall we? It’s only fair.
Notes
[1] Abbot, R. T. (1973)
American Malacologists. Published
by the author, Falls Church, Va.
[2] Goodrich, C. (1939) The scientific writings of Bryant
Walker. An annotated bibliography. Occas. Pprs. Mus. Zool. Univ. Mich. 402: 1 -
28. This is also the source of the Walker portrait accompanying the post.
[3] Walker, B. (1917)
A revision of the classification of the North American patelliform
Ancylidae, with descriptions of new species.
Nautilus 31: 1 - 10.
[4] All the anecdotes in paragraph three of this essay come from a very sweet and personal obituary published by
Goodrich (1936) in Nautilus 50: 59-64.
[5] Calvin Goodrich ranks very high on my list of
professional heros, just behind Darwin, Mendel, and Morgan. For my personal tribute, see:
- The Legacy of Calvin Goodrich [23Jan07]
[6] Walker, B. (1918)
A synopsis of the classification of the freshwater Mollusca of North
America, North of Mexico, and a catalogue of the more recently described
species, with notes. Univ. Mich. Mus.
Zool. Misc. Publ. 6: 1 - 213.
[7] Walker, B.
(1904) New species of Somatogyrus. Nautilus 17: 133 - 142.
[8] Walker. B. (1906)
New and little known species of Amnicolidae. Nautilus 19: 97-100, 114-117.
[9] Walker, B. (1909)
New Amnicolidae from Alabama.
Nautilus 22: 85 - 90. Walker's "Plate VI" shows Clappia "clappi" shell (1), operculum (4), and radula (7), along with various other Somatogyrus from Alabama.
[10] Walker, B. (1915) Apical characters in Somatogyrus with descriptions of three new species. The Nautilus 29: 37 - 41, 49 - 53.
[11] Actually there were approximately 30 species of
Somatogyrus by 1909, including 8 described by authors prior to Walker.
[13] The only exception may be Rhodacmaea hinkleyi (Walker
1908), which even if it is distinct, is probably extinct.
[14] I have posted updates on all three of these genera in
recent years:
- Phylogenetic sporting and the genus Laevapex [20July07]
- Two species of Ferrissia [8Dec10]
- Rhodacmaea Ridotto [8Aug11]
[15] The first curator of malacology at the University of
Michigan was Miss Mina Winslow, whom Walker had some hand in “encouraging” to
the job, according to van der Schalie (Bulletin of the AMU 1980: 1 – 5). I cannot discover when Miss Winslow actually
assumed her position, but the date of her first “Occasional Paper” was 1917, a
couple years after Walker’s first.