SUMNER, FRANCIS BERTODY

(b Pomfret, Connecticut, 1 August 1874; d. La Jolla, California, 6 Septermber 1945)

biology,

Sumner spent a lonely childhood in the bare hills near Oakland, California, to which his parents, Arthur Sumner and Mary Augusta Upton, moved a few months after he was born. His father had been a schoolteacher before taking up, unsuccessfully, small-scale farming. He educated his two sons himself until Francis was ten, and he encouraged their collection and observation of the local wildlife.

In 1884 the family moved to Colorado Springs Colorado, where Francis discovered himself to be a surprisingly good student. He also became conscious of his lack of social accomplishment, which deficiency he later declared, not quite accurately, a lifelong shortcoming. When the family moved to Minneapolis in 1887, Sumner attended high school and in 1894 received the B.S. at the University of Minnesota. He collected fishes in the remote streams and lakes of that state, under the direction of Henry F. Nachtrieb.

At Columbia University, where he went for graduate work in 1895, Sumner was attracted to zoology by Bashford Dean, Edmund B. Wilson, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, although he was always interested in philosophy as well. He received the Ph.D. in 1901 with a thesis on fish embryology that was written under Dean, who had arranged for Sumner’s participation in a disastrous Nile expedition (1899) to collect Polypterus. For the next seven years Sumner taught natural history at the College of the City of New York and spent most of his summers at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

In 1903 Sumner married Margaret Elizabeth Clark; in the same year he took up a summer appointment as director of the laboratory of the United States Bureau of Fisheries at Woods Hole. For three years he conducted a detailed biological survey of that area, working with others in collecting and classifying, and himself summarizing the correlations and drawing generalizations. Sumner concluded that the varying distribution of closely related species is a result of environmental differences. In 1911, as naturalist aboard the Albatross, he conducted a similar survey of San Francisco Bay for the Bureau of Fisheries.

In 1913 Sumner went to La Jolla, California, to work at the Scripps Institution for Biological Research. The director of the Institution, William E. Ritter, became interested in Sumner’s proposed population studies of the deer mouse, Peromyscus, and encouraged him to undertake them. Sumner collected many distinctive subspecies of Peromyscus extensively in California and to a lesser degree in other states, to breed through a number of generations in a uniform climate, in order to determine whether they would tend to become less variable. He found that through as many as twelve generations the colors and other measurable characters continued to be distinctive. Reluctantly, he concluded that Mendelian inheritance, which he called “a fad,” was a more likely cause of speciation by means of minute, cumulative genetic changes than was the environment.

When the Scripps Institution of Oceanography succeeded the former institution for biological research, Sumner’s studies turned from mice to the pigments of fishes, a field in which he had done significant research during a six-month visit in 1910 to the Zoological Station in Naples. His original experiments with a variety of fishes proved the direct effect of the albedo upon the deposition of melanin and of guanine within the chromatophores of the skin. Always engrossed singlemindedly in one subject at a time, he did no further work on Peromyscus, but his stocks of mice and unpublished material on them were transferred to Lee Raymond Dice at the University of Michigan.

Sumner was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and Phi Beta Kappa.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Sumner was a prolific writer on a variety of biological subjects. Of his major researches, the biological survey at Woods Hole was reported in “A Biological Survey of the Waters of Woods Hole and Vicinity,” in Bulletin of the Bureau of Fisheries for 1911, 31 (1913), pts. 1 – 2, written with R. G. Osburn, L. J. Cole, and B. M. Davis. The results of the survey of San Francisco Bay appeared in “A Report Upon the Physical Conditions in San Francisco Bay, Based Upon the Operations of the United States Fisheries Steamer Albatross, During the Years 1912 and 1913,” in University of California Publications in Zoology, 14 (1914), 1 – 198, written with G. D. Louderback, W. L. Schmitt, and E. C. Johnston. In addition to many shorter papers on Peromyscus, he summarized the results of his fifteen-year study in “Genetic, Distributional and Evolutionary Studies of the Subspecies of Deer-mice (Peromyscus),” in Bibliographia genetica, 9 (1932), 1 – 106.

Sumner’s early work on pigments of fishes is described in “The Adjustment of Flatfishes to Various Backgrounds,” in Journal of Experimental Zoology, 10 (1911), 409–479. His later studies were reported in a number of papers, the most significant being “Quantitative Changes in Pigmentation, Resulting From Visual Stimuli in Fishes and Amphibia,” in Biological Reviews, 15 (1940), 351 – 375. A candid account of Sumner’s life and convictions is given in his self-critical autobiography, The Life History of an American Naturalist (Lancaster, Pa., 1945).

II. Secondary Literature. A complete bibliography and review of Sumner’s researches is in Charles Manning Child, “Biographical Memoir of Francis Bertody Sumner,” in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 25 (1948), 147–173. Letters and personal memorabilia are in the library of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California.

Elizabeth Noble Shor