BioOne sees sustainable scholarly publishing as an inherently collaborative enterprise connecting authors, nonprofit publishers,academic institutions, research libraries, and research funders in the common goal of maximizing access to critical research.

Evansia, a Tribute to Alexander W. EvansAuthor(s): Harvey A. MillerSource: Evansia, 28(4):109-110. 2011.Published By: The American Bryological and Lichenological Society, Inc.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1639/079.028.0406URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1639/079.028.0406

BioOne (www.bioone.org) is a nonprofit, online aggregation of core research in thebiological, ecological, and environmental sciences. BioOne provides a sustainable onlineplatform for over 170 journals and books published by nonprofit societies, associations,museums, institutions, and presses.

Your use of this PDF, the BioOne Web site, and all posted and associated contentindicates your acceptance of BioOne’s Terms of Use, available at www.bioone.org/page/terms_of_use.

Usage of BioOne content is strictly limited to personal, educational, and non-commercialuse. Commercial inquiries or rights and permissions requests should be directed to theindividual publisher as copyright holder.

Evansia 28(4) 109

History speaking

Evansia, a Tribute to Alexander W. Evans

Harvey A. MillerMiami University Herbarium, Oxford, Ohio 45056

E-mail: bryolaladonna@aol.com

Evansia honors a pioneer student of both liverworts and lichens of North America. Evans is remembered and respected for his detailed investigations on the Hepaticae in North America that provided the basis for his 1939 summary of the Classification of Hepaticae published in Botanical Review. His enlightened synthesis laid groundwork subsequent systematic studies. In his later years, he expanded his increasing interest in Cladonia – effectively abandoning the liverworts. He was one of the first Americans to employ lichen acid crystal techniques developed by the Japanese chemist Yasuhiko Asahina as a tool for the identification of lichens. Evans told me that he found the use of chemicals as a tool for identification was a fascinating subject which he very much enjoyed. Alexander Evans was, in every sense, a modern American taxonomist and innovator in the two major areas embraced by our society.

Alexander William Evans was born May 17, 1868, in Buffalo, New York and died December 6, 1959 in New Haven, Connecticut. He was one of the last students of Daniel Cady Eaton, a Yale undergraduate who took his doctorate with Asa Gray at Harvard. Eaton is generally credited with being the first botanist at Yale, having been appointed to that post in 1864. Evans grew up in New Haven and attended Yale University graduating in 1890. Upon graduation, he entered the Yale Medical School and earned the M. D. degree in 1892. He interned at New Haven City Hospital for two years but gave up medicine for botany and went to the University of Berlin. There he studied with the renowned Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny, a cryptogamic botanist, morphologist, and physiologist now generally remembered for the Kny wall charts featuring beautifully drawn, detailed morphological features. Evans was asked to fill the botany position at Yale following Eaton’s death in June, 1895. Evans assumed responsibility for botany and the herbarium following in Eaton’s footsteps, although he specialized in hepatics rather than ferns.

Evans’ first publication was a Provisional List of the Hepaticae of the Hawaiian Islands published in 1892 in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. This came about because of the strong ties developed between Eaton and Yale alumnus David Dwight Baldwin (Yale class of 1857), from Hawaii. Baldwin was an educator and business man who published several lists of plant species known from the Kingdom of Hawaii in Thrumm’s Hawaiian Almanac and Annual. In the 1877 issue, he published a three page List of Hawaiian Mosses and Hepaticae. Baldwin lived in the Lahina area of West Maui at the base of Mount Kukui in 1875-1876 where he collected bryophytes in the high altitude rainforest. He sent his plant collections to Eaton as the Professor of Botany at Yale. Eaton passed the hepatics on to Evans who added many species to the known flora. Some of Evans’ earliest publications dealt with Hawaiian hepatics including the treatment of the Tribe Jubuloideae and description of the new genus Acromastigum.

One of Evans’ first students was another Hawaii resident who collected bryophytes, Charles Montague Cooke, Jr. He prepared a dissertation on the Hawaiian Hepaticae of the Tribe Trigonantheae which appeared in 1902 under Evans’ guidance. Cooke, wealthy grandson of a co-founder of Castle and Cooke sugar factors and founder of the Bank of Hawaii, developed an interest in land snails and did not publish again on bryophytes. His many publications and collections at the B. P. Bishop Museum related to Pacific malacology demonstrate impressive scholarship.

Evansia 28(4) 110

George Elwood Nichols was a Yale graduate (A. B. 1904; Ph. D. 1909) who specialized in mosses and joined Professor Evans in production of The Bryophytes of Connecticut published in 1908. He considered himself an ecologist with an interest in bryophytes. He was an effective and influential teacher and a very active botanist, especially in ecology, throughout his career at Yale.

Aaron John “Uncle Jack” Sharp (not an Evans student) told me that Nichols was involved in what was intended to be a joke that may have backfired. Sharp believed the intended joke influenced Evans’switch to lichenology. Apparently, Nichols and a group of young bryologists, including Sharp, were sitting around a campfire at the University of Michigan Biological Station talking about Evans and his increasing attention to Cladoniae and waning interest in liverworts. Someone suggested that they send him a telegram as a joke complaining about his shift in interest because there was so much remaining to be done with hepatics that there was no need to look elsewhere for something to do. They seemingly made some other suggestions that they thought would be humorous, but apparently Evans did not. Another explanation related to me by William Campbell “Bill” Steere was that the biography published by Nichols in Annales Bryologici in 1938 upset Evans so much that he withdrew entirely from bryology. Evans, himself, told me that he was moving away from hepatics and into lichens at that time because they were of more interest to him—especially the use of chemicals and lichen acid crystals as an aid to identification of Cladonia species.

Another hepaticologist, Lois Clark, worked briefly (during 1907-1908 academic year) with Evans at Yale studying hepatics on the recommendation of Theodore Christian Frye who had started the herbarium at the University of Washington in 1904. He embraced the total flora of the northwest, including non-vascular cryptogams, and encouraged Miss Clark to familiarize herself with liverworts, as she did in Evans' laboratory, before returning to Seattle and the northwest flora.

Because she earned her Ph. D. at Yale, Margaret Hannah Fulford from Cincinnati has been sometimes considered an Evans’ student. Although she told me that she had contact with Evans, and was strongly influenced by his methods, her dissertation work was directed by Hempstead Castle, a former Evans graduate student, on the Yale faculty in botany.

After his retirement in 1936, Evans continued his studies of Cladonia in his office off the Yale herbarium until his death. I first met Dr. Evans in 1954 while I was still a graduate student at Stanford working with William Campbell “Bill” Steere on my dissertation on the Phytogeography of the Hawaiian Hepaticae. A Grant-in-Aid from Sigma Xi allowed me to study in eastern herbaria. I drove from California with my notes as well as slides I had taken in Hawaii. I visited herbaria and bryologists including A. Leroy Andrews at his home, Farlow Herbarium, Yale University Herbarium, New York Botanical Garden, Edwin B. Bartram at his home, and the “crypt” of Smithsonian Institution before returning to Stanford.

I studied specimens in all the visited herbaria, but at Yale Dr. Evans said he would like to see my photos of Hawaii, especially of the Puu Kukui mountain trail where Baldwin had collected on Maui. Next day I gave a slide talk to about 30 students and faculty. Dr. Evans brought Mrs. Evans to the presentation and I found her to be a warm and gracious lady. They had three daughters. At the time of his death, he was survived by his wife, two daughters, and seven grandchildren.

I visited Evans and the Yale herbarium several times during the year I was visiting instructor at the University of Massachusetts. Evans was there nearly every time and always most cordial and supportive of my hepatic studies. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to meet and talk with him during each visit. I cannot help but marvel at the sophistication of his work given the time and the technological changes that occurred in his lifetime. Evansia could not be better named as a journal representing the diverse interests of members of our society.