Ralph Vary Chamberlin

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Ralph Vary Chamberlin

Ralph Vary Chamberlin (born January 3, 1879 in Salt Lake City , † October 31, 1967 there ) was an American zoologist , ethnographer and historian .

Life

Chamberlin came from a Mormon family with twelve children. He studied biology at the University of Utah with a bachelor's degree in 1898, taught for four years at Latter Day Saint's High School and continued his studies in 1902 at Stanford University and Cornell University (as a Smith Fellow). In 1905 he received his doctorate in zoology with John Henry Comstock at Cornell with a dissertation on the spider family Lycosidae and their taxonomy in North America underwent a revision. From 1904 he taught at the University of Utah and was there from 1905 to 1907 Dean of the School of Medicine.

From 1908 he was professor and holder of the chair of zoology at Brigham Young University , as part of a campaign by President George H. Brimhall (1852-1932) to increase the academic reputation of the Mormon University. In 1909 his brother William Henry Chamberlin (1870–1921) also came to teach philosophy, and with the brothers Joseph and Henry Peterson, who represented psychology and pedagogy, they tried to modernize the curriculum. They advocated the compatibility of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution with religion and for historical biblical criticism. It came to a conflict with the university leadership and in 1911 Chamberlin and the two Petersons left the university because they did not want to deviate from the Darwinian teaching. William Chamberlin followed them five years later.

From 1911 to 1913 Chamberlin was a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and from 1913 to 1925 he was a curator for spiders, myriapods and worms at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University . 1926 until his retirement in 1948 he was again at the University of Utah as head of the faculty of biology. On a sabbatical in 1939 he visited European universities and was president of a section of the International Entomologists Congress in Berlin.

In 1910 he became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1942 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Utah.

Latrodectus hesperus , Chamberlin and Ivie, 1935

He wrote over 400 scientific articles. He was a specialist in spiders and myriapods (millipedes, centipedes) and named around 2000 new species, for example the western black widow , and several species are also named after him (such as the East Asian millipede Chamberlinius ). He also dealt with other animal species, with local Indian culture ( Gosiute ) and most recently with the history of education in Utah and specifically the history of the University of Utah. He also wrote a biography of his brother William.

He was married twice. From the first marriage, which lasted from 1899 to the divorce in 1910, he had four children, from the second marriage, which ended with the death of his wife in 1967, he had six children.

Fonts

  • The Kingdom of Man, University of Utah 1938 (Frederick William Reynolds Memorial Lecture), online
  • Memories-John R. Park, 1949
  • The University of Utah: A History of Its First Hundred Years - 1850-1950, University of Utah Press 1960
  • Life and Philosophy of WH Chamberlin, 1925
  • with Richard L. Hoffman : Checklist of the millipeds of North America, Bulletin Smithsonian Institution 212, 1958
  • with Wilton Ivie: The spiders of Alaska, Bulletin of the University of Utah, Volume 37, No. 10, 1947

literature

  • Uschi Eckstein, Robert Samm: Famous arachnologists: Ralph Vary Chamberlin, 1879-1967 . In: Arachnological magazine . 9, No. 5, 2001, pp. 11-12.

Web links

Commons : Ralph Vary Chamberlin  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

References and comments

  1. ↑ What a Christening! Underground professor named 2000 bugs , The Desert News, Salt Lake City, April 24, 1941
  2. ↑ For example, in 1929 with David Tracy Jones he published A descriptive catalog of the Mollusca of Utah . Bulletin University of Utah, Volume 19
  3. ^ The ethno-botany of the Gosiute Indians of Utah, Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, Volume 2, 1911
personal data
SURNAME Chamberlin, Ralph Vary
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American zoologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Salt Lake City
DATE OF DEATH October 31, 1967
Place of death Salt Lake City