Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
I knew that “ventral” referred to underside and “hemipenes” were the sex organs
of lizards and snakes, but not that a high school internship with Henry at K.U. would
soon set my life's course, or that he would author almost two hundred publica-
tions—comprising more than four thousand pages—on plants, snails, spiders, and di-
verse vertebrates. This unassuming man started graduate work in 1931, when the dis-
coveries of Darwin and Wallace were only decades old, and took his first academic posi-
tion in 1948, five years before James Watson and Francis Crick unraveled DNA. Decades
later, after he summarized half a century of fieldwork at a symposium in his honor, a
student would wryly note that she couldn't call only four years of horned lizard research
“long term.” Applause typically occurs
after
such presentations, but Henry's arrival at
the podium that day provoked a standing ovation.
Fitch's life reflects a conundrum with broad implications, one that has dogged my
own career. Darwin, Wallace, and countless others have been drawn into nature by
orchids, beetles, or whatever seized their fancy. If young naturalists become scientists,
however—and this is truer now than ever before—acclaim more likely flows from gener-
alizing than from gathering facts. Ernst Mayr, a prime modern example, is renowned for
synthesizing evolutionary theory, not for his discovery of some four hundred new kinds
of birds. At first glance, then, Henry's lifelong focus on organisms themselves seems
anachronistic, the esteem in which he's held a bit unexpected. In the chronicle of our
lives that winds through this topic, I set out to illuminate his stature as well as the en-
during value of natural history.
5
Henry Sheldon Fitch was born at the family home in Utica, New York, early on Christ-
dropped out of Harvard Medical School in favor of life as an agriculturist. His mother's
family had been in Massachusetts since the 1600s, and despite a Boston finishing school
background in music and literature, Alice Chenery Fitch enjoyed the outdoors and often
took her children on long walks. In 1910, with two young kids in tow, Chester and Alice
moved to Oregon and settled on 116 acres of pear and apple orchards, at the southern
end of the sparsely populated Rogue River Valley.
The Fitch place had commanding views of the surrounding countryside, and for much
of Henry's childhood, regardless of weather, he slept on the screen porch, exposed to
the sights and sounds of nighttime. An early fascination with animals was fostered by
the family's library of natural history topics, conversations with his father, and their rur-
al lifestyle. As a boy he ranged over nearby wildlands, replete with scrub oaks on foot-
hill slopes and heavily forested at higher elevations in the Siskiyous. He fished for trout,
shot and trapped California ground squirrels, caught western fence lizards and two spe-
cies of kingsnakes for pets, and even as a five-year-old impressed onlookers with his
fearless handling of the belligerent local gopher snakes.
When Henry was thirteen Chester and Alice sent him and older sister Margaret back
to Utica to “absorb some culture,” but as he put it, “The effort was a failure.” Photos
from that trip show a slender teenager with high forehead and thick hair parted a bit
to the left, taller than his grandfather and wearing a tie. In one image Henry is holding
a northern watersnake, and it couldn't have helped cultural development that his rel-
atives, convinced he'd caught a copperhead, killed the harmless serpent! Nonetheless,
