BUMPUS, HERMON CAREY

(b.Buckfield Maine, 5 May 1862; d. Pasadena, California, 21 June 1943)

zoology, evolution, biometry, natural history education.

One of the pioneers in the use of statistics to measure ongoing evolution, Bumpus was the second of three sons born to Laurin Bumpus and the eldest child born to Laurin’s second wife, Abbie Eaton, a former schoolteacher. His father was a cabinetmaker who moved to Boston and became a missionary and social worker when Hermon was six years old.

Although he was a frail youth, Bumpus developed a strong love for nature and became an avid collector of animals. He entered Brown University in 1879 and was known as the student “who had shot, skinned, stuffed, and eaten every living animal.” He studied natural history under John Jenks, a defender of the religious doctrine of special creation, and Alpheus Packard, an advocate of Lamarckian evolution. Bumpus not only collected and prepared specimens but also drew illustrations of animals, some of which were published. After graduating from Brown University in 1884, he remained there as assistant in zoology until 1886. He taught zoology at Olivet College from 1886 to 1889, during which time he married Lucy Ella Nightingdale (28 December 1886). They had two sons. Bumpus entered Clark University in 1889, wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the embryology of the American lobster, and received his Ph.D. in 1891. He then returned to Brown, where he taught zoology for the next ten years.

Bumpus established a summer school for biology students at the one-year-old Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in 1889. He served as assistant director of the Marine Biological Laboratory (1893–1895) and on its board of trustees (1897–1942). Bumpus was scientific director of the laboratory of the U.S. Fish Commission at Woods Hole from 1895 to 1900. In addition to stimulating a revival of scientific research into practical problems of the fishing industry, he published papers on the fate of flatfish fry liberated along the coast, the peregrinations of lobsters, and the rediscovery of great numbers of tilefish at the edge of the continental shelf, where they had not been reported for twenty years, His successful efforts in reviving scientific research in fisheries led to his election as president of the fourth International Fisheries Congress in 1908.

Bumpus pioneered the use of biometry to analyze biological data in America. He stimulated numerous investigators at Woods Hole to use biometrical methods in their biological studies. Bumpus published four papers summarizing his studies of variation. In one of them he described variation in the number of vertebrae and the position of the pelvic girdle relative to the vertebral column in the mud puppy Necturus.

Bumpus also compared samples of eggs of the English sparrow from the United States and from England. He found that the eggs from the populations of sparrows that were descendants of birds introduced into the United States were more variable than the eggs from England. Bumpus concluded that the greater variability recurred because more variant individuals had a greater chance to survive in the new American environment, where the forces of natural selection no longer operated as stringently as they did in England. In a similar study he found that populations of the small tidal-zone snail Litorina littorea that had been introduced into the United States were more variable than those from Europe.

On 1 February 1898 a severe winter storm with snow, sleet, and rain in Providence, Rhode Island, caused many English sparrows wintering in the vines of the old athenaeum at Brown University to be blown down. Bumpus noticed the sparrows lying exhausted or dead on the ground and quickly perceived that this could be “a possible instance of the operation of natural selection, through the process of the elimination of the unfit.” He brought 136 of these sparrows to his anatomical laboratory, made quantitative measurements of nine morphological traits of each downed sparrow, and compared the measurements of the seventy-two birds that survived with those of the sixty-four birds that died. Bumpus published the results of his statistical analysis of the natural selection generated by the storm as “The Elimination of the Unfit as Illustrated by the Introduced Sparrow. Passer domesticus” (1899), in which he concluded. “The process of selective elimination is most severe with extremely variable individuals, no matter in what direction the variations may occur.”

Bumpus’ study of the selective mortality in English sparrows generated by a winter storm is considered to be a classic study of “natural selection in action” and has been summarized in many biology texts. It also has been reprinted several times. By publishing the nine morphological measurements for each of the 136 sparrows and arranging them by survivors. nonsurvivors, sex, and age of males. Bumpus enabled later investigators to reanalyze the storm-induced selective mortality in Passer domesticus.

Bumpus became assistant to the president and curator of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in 1900. He was promoted to director in 1902. In his museum activities, as in his previous university work. Bumpus contended that both teaching and research were necessary obligations of the institution, He viewed museums not merely as storehouses for natural history specimens to be used in research but also as educational institutions with roles to perform that are different from those of schools or colleges. He encouraged the replacement of “dreary series of stuffed animals” with “realistic groups in an outdoors atmosphere” and established a department of education at the museum. Bumpus actively promoted natural history in numerous official capacities, in cluding president of the American Morphological Society (1902), the American Society of Zoologists (1903), and the American Association of Museums (1906, 1924).

Bumpus left the American Museum of Natural History in 1911 to become the business manager at the University of Wisconsin, a position he held until accepting an offer to become president of Tufts University in 1914, remaining there until he retired in 1919. Bumpus became a leader in outdoor education, as environment education was then called, during the 1920s, serving as chairman of the Special Advisory Board of the National Park Service from its inception in 1924 to 1931. The Advisory Board of the National Park Service was created in 1931, and Bumpus continued as chairman until 1940, when he resigned because of poor health. He pioneered the development of “trailside museums,” contending that “the real museum is outside the walls of the building and the purpose of the museum work is to render the out-of-doors intelligible.” Bumpus trailside museums contained exhibits that explained the surrounding environment. For his creation and popularization of trailside museums in national parks, Bumpus received the Cornelius Amory Pugsley Gold Medal of the Scenic and Historic Preservation Society for 1940. The American Association of Museums awarded the Kent Diploma to him in 1941, “in recognition of distinguished service rendered to the cause of museum education,” an honor that led him to write in the margin of the diploma, “More appreciated than any other testimonial.”

Bumpus experienced a severe heart attack in early June 1943 and died on the twenty-first of that month.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Bumpus’ classic paper “The Elimination of the Unfit as Illustrated by the Introduced Sparrow, Power domesticus” was published in Biological Lectures from the Marine Biological Laboratory, Wood’s Holl, Mass., 1898, VI (Boston, 1899), 209–226 Additional papers by Bumpus include “The Embryology of the American Lobster,” in Journal of Morphology, 5 (1891): “The Importance of Extended Scientific Investigation.” in Bulletin of the U.S. Fish Commission (1897): “On the Reappearance of the Tile-fish, Lopholatilus chamaeleonticeps,” in Science. n. 8 , no, 200 (1898): “Work at the Biological Laboratory of the U.S. fish Commission at Woods Holl,” ibid, no. 186 (1899): “The Results Attending the Experiments in Lobster Culture Made by the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries,” ibid., n.s, 14 , no. 365 (1901): “The Museum as a Factor in Education,” in Independent, 61 (2 August 1906) 269–272: ibid “Objectives of Museum Work in National and State Parks,” in Museum News, 15 , no. 4 (1937), A facsimile reprint of this paper. along with bibliographical references to six subsequent statistical reanalyses of Bumpus’ data, is in C. J. Bajema. ed., Natural Selection Theory: From the Speculations of the Greeks to the Quantitative Measurements of the Biometricians (New York. 1983). 300–301, 348–365.

II. Secondary Literature. A bibliography of Bumpus’ papers and addresses is in Hermon Carey Bumpus, Jr., Hermon Carey Bumpus; Yankee Naturalist (Minneapolis, 1947). A. O. Mead wrote an obituary in Science, 99 (14 January 1944) 28–30.

Carl Jay Bajema