How palynology could have been paepalology: the naming of a discipline

ABSTRACT

From its ‘modern’ pollen-analytical beginnings, the science of what we now term palynology wrestled with terminology and sought an acceptable name for the discipline. Starting in 1943, the mimeographed Pollen Analysis Circular, edited from Ohio by Paul Sears, led to discussion of the content, organisation and naming of a developing discipline. This came to a head in 1944 with Ernst Antev's plea for ‘The Right Word’ and the suggestion of the word ‘palynology’ from the Cardiff duo of Harold Hyde and David Williams. In the search for a suitable term, Hyde consulted Cardiff-based Irish classicist Leopold Richardson who advised against the word palynology and suggested six alternatives. Hyde, however, was wedded to the term palynology and, in the interests of euphony and ‘hankering after my own offspring’, was seemingly able to overcome Richardson's scholarly objections by argument. Hyde and Williams defined palynology as ‘the study of pollen and other spores and their dispersal, and applications thereof’. This was considered an advance because alternative terms such as pollen analysis, pollen statistics and pollen science did not include the application or interpretation of pollen evidence. The term palynology quickly found acceptability within the pages of the Pollen Analysis Circular and subsequently received an airing in Nature. Once palynology was adopted by the influential Swede Gunnar Erdtman, it was rapidly accepted by the palaeoecological community.

KEYWORDS:

• Palynology
• etymology
• E.V. Antevs
• H.A. Hyde
• D.A. Williams
• L.J.D. Richardson
• G. Erdtman

Acknowledgments

For access to archival information, we would like to thank Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Wales (Hyde papers and correspondence), Nigel Morgan of Cardiff University Library, Maria Asp and the Center for History of Science, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Pia Östensson and the Swedish Museum of Natural History (Erdtman papers), along with those bodies granting permission to use the portrait photographs. We are grateful to Anne Bryan for the photograph of her father (D.A. Williams) and the valuable background information, to Angela Lord for advice on Greek orthography and to Pat Wiltshire for Pitman shorthand interpretation. We are indebted to Richardson's former colleague, Nick Fisher, for drawing the Starkie autobiography to our attention. The Royal Irish Academy, the Classical Association (Claire Davenport) and Trinity College Dublin (Aisling Lockhart) provided additional information on Richardson. We are appreciative of comments from Ed Schofield and Evan Zimroth on an early draft of the paper, and to two referees, and we thank Jim Riding for his encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Bryan had four children, one of whom is the acclaimed Quaternary palynologist Margaret Bryan Davis.

2. Wilson was a pioneer palaeopalynologist who had spent a junior year abroad at the University of Leeds in northern England as a botany/geology student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At Leeds he was hosted by William Holmes Burrell (1864–1945; Edwards 2017), a bryologist and honorary curator of the herbarium. Burrell (1924) had been carrying out work on Pennine peats along with others and had been influenced by a visit to Leeds by Gunnar Erdtman (section 5). There were several reasons for Wilson's decision to go to Leeds. His parents thought he should study in England and his student housemate at Wisconsin was an exchange student from Leeds (Kosanke & Cross 1995). The student was a grandson of Joseph B. Priestley (1733–1804), dissenting clergyman, Liberal political theorist, scholar and chemist who was credited with the discovery of oxygen. Burrell, along with Sears, assisted in the PhD supervision of Wilson after his return to the USA (Wilson 1938). In 1974 Wilson became the sixth recipient of the Gunnar Erdtman International Gold Medal for Palynology.

3. Matthes was a founder and president of the Association of American Geographers, and he introduced the terms nivation and Little Ice Age (Matthes 1939).

4. Hyde, son of a hairdresser, was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, England. He graduated with a BA from Downing College, Cambridge, in 1914 and then became a schoolmaster in Birmingham and Stamford, Lincolnshire. Five months before the end of the First World War, he joined the British Army's Royal Garrison Artillery as part of the Territorial Force (volunteer reserve) and served in France with the rank of 2^nd Lieutenant. From 1919 he was a teacher at Tonbridge School, Kent, before his National Museum of Wales appointment in 1922. He remained in Cardiff for the rest of his life. He married Dorothy Kathleen Smallman (1894–?1985) from Tenbury, Worcestershire, in 1917 and they had two children.

5. Williams, the son of a mining engineer, was born in Cardiff, Wales, and spent most of his life there apart from clinical training at University College Hospital, London. Marrying Marjorie McVicar (1909–1970) in 1935, he ran the first Asthma and Allergy Clinic in Wales from 1935 onwards (BHD 1986; Thomas 1986). He completed his MD thesis on allergy to milk in 1937. Williams became acquainted with Hyde because he recognised the link between pollen and allergies and sought a botanist with similar interests with whom to conduct research into the subject. With the support of a Cardiff Council grant, Hyde and Williams founded the Asthma and Allergy Research Unit – perhaps the first publicly funded asthma research unit in the UK. His cooperation with Hyde led Williams to study mould spores as a cause of allergies and asthma. Williams rose to become consultant physician to the Cardiff teaching hospitals and he was honoured by British, European and American allergy academies. He was regarded as a fine teacher and clinician, and two of his four children became doctors. He was considered to be an intensely modest, private man, a music lover and a keen angler, ‘deeply interested in people and their welfare’ (Thomas 1986, p. 540).

6. In September 2016, while lecturing at Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Wales in Cardiff at a Quaternary Research Association conference organised by HSP, KJE discussed the value of archives in studies of the history of palynology. HSP said that an archive of Harold Hyde's correspondence existed in the Museum and invited him to consult it. The opportunity to do so came in December 2016. KJE and HSP sat in the bowels of the Museum and, being aware of the Hyde and Williams suggestion, it made sense to look for any correspondence relating to Richardson. KJE's eyes alighted on a long letter from Richardson and he read it to HSP. She excitedly exclaimed ‘That's archive gold!’ – hence the title of this section. The authors are undertaking a wider investigation into Hyde.

7. Richardson was born in Rathmines, Dublin, the son of a Protestant drapery warehouseman who hailed from Dungannon, County Tyrone in the north of Ireland and a mother from County Louth in the south. Newspaper reports indicate that he was an outstanding student at the High School in Dublin.

8. At Trinity College Dublin, in the Junior Freshman class, he was placed in the First Rank for Mathematics (Dublin Daily Express 7 May 1913), and a little over a year later he was named one of six Classical Scholars (Belfast News Letter 9 June 1914). He graduated BA in 1916.

9. In his book Scholars and gypsies: an autobiography, Hispanist Walter Fitzwilliam Starkie, writing of the Easter Rising (Easter Monday, 24 April 1916) when armed Republicans rose up against British rule in Ireland, recorded that his ‘friend L.J.D. Richardson or Reekie…had been wandering about most of the day and had witnessed the proclamation of the Sinn Fein Republic at Nelson's Pillar at noon. “It was,” he said, “very unimpressive…”’ (Starkie 1963, p. 144–145).

10. Born Frances Petticrew Paton (1895–1955), the daughter of a Protestant clergyman, in Ballymena, County Antrim, she accrued numerous prizes from school and university (also Trinity College Dublin) in subjects as diverse as Latin, English, mathematics, geography, French and German (graduating with First Class Honours in Modern Languages; Ballymena Observer 27 December 1918) and later a qualification from the Sorbonne, Paris (Ballymena Observer 24 February 1922). Leopold and Frances were married in 1925 and they subsequently had two daughters.

11. Apart from national involvement, Richardson was also active in the Cardiff branch of the Classical Association, for which he acted as honorary president, and he organised many speakers and regular productions of classical plays (Stray 2004).

12. ‘A passionate collector, Richardson never knowingly threw away any scrap of print, to such an extent in fact that at one time he was reduced to living in the attic of a house otherwise given over to books and newspapers’ (Chrimes 1983, p. 225). 

13. This refers to a paper by Leonard Robert Palmer (1906–1984), a classicist at the University of Manchester (later professor of comparative philology at Oxford) in the journal Glotta (a German journal of Greek and Latin historical linguistics, published in Göttingen, not Munich; Palmer 1938, in response to a paper published by Richardson in 1936). Palmer was a controversial figure (The Times 1984) who worked on material as diverse as the Linear B tablets, archaeological records of Minoan Crete and Chomskian linguistics. With him, ‘Sometimes (though rarely) acuteness degenerated into perversity, and enthusiasm into polemics…and occasionally [he] made things worse by reacting violently’. He began his studies at the then University of South Wales and Monmouthshire and may have met Richardson as a student. During the Second World War he worked on code-breaking and translation for British naval intelligence at Bletchley Park. Richardson once observed that ‘classical graduates seem to have a special flair for certain hush-hush work’ (Stray 2004, p. 161).

14. The study of antiquities.

15. Miss Eveline Jenkins (1893-1976) was the botanical artist in the Botany Department of the National Museum of Wales between 1927 and 1959; she specialised in fungi (Lazarus & Pardoe 2003).

16. Aleuria varia (Hedw.) Boud., now known as Peziza varia (Hedw.) Fr.

17. David Allardice Webb (1912–1994), noted botanist and eventually professor of systematic botany at TCD. Apart from his Flora and heavy involvement with the Flora Europaea he also produced books on TCD's history and its artwork. He was ‘the eminence grise (and, in later years, eminence blanc) of Irish botany…a colossus with one foot firmly placed in his native country but the other planted in Britain and Europe…his amazing memory and his working knowledge of some 15 European languages made him both a major driving force and frankly, a somewhat feared figure…the most incisive mind of his generation in College’ (TCD 2017). Webb died in a car accident while en route to the herbarium at the University of Reading.

18. Hyde had sent a letter on behalf of himself and Williams, with the note to be published, to the editor of Nature on 26 January 1945 (Supplementary Material Figure 8). He was also selling the technique locally. In lecture notes for a presentation on 13 February 1945 to the University College of South Wales Biological Society, Hyde declares ‘Palynology is a new science with a great future’.

19. Fægri also cited the year of publication in the Circular as 1943 rather than 1944.

20. The Palynology journal webpage speaks of ‘covering all aspects of the science of organic microfossils and their modern counterparts…. We accept papers on both pre-Quaternary and Quaternary palynology, and palaeobotany. Articles across the entire range of palynomorph groups and geological ages are welcomed’ (http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=tpal20); while the AASP – Palynological Society website states that ‘Palynology is the study of pollen, spores, dinoflagellates, and other microscopic “palynomorphs”’ (http://palynology.org/what-is-palynology/) and ‘Palynomorphs include both plant and animal structures that are microscopic in size…. In the strict sense, palynomorphs are recognized as microscopic structures that are abundant in most sediments and sedimentary rocks, and are resistant to the routine pollen-extraction procedures…. In a broader sense, other microfossils sometimes are given “courtesy appointments” as “palynomorphs” even [if] they do not survive routine pollen-extraction procedures’. (http://palynology.org/palynomorphs/). 

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin J. Edwards

KEVIN J. EDWARDS holds degrees from the Universities of St Andrews (MA, DSc) and Aberdeen (PhD). He is a professor in physical geography and adjunct chair in archaeology in the University of Aberdeen, adjunct professor in the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He has held academic posts and visiting research positions in a number of universities including those of Queen's Belfast, Birmingham, Sheffield, Minnesota, Copenhagen, Oxford and Cambridge. A palynologist with a strong involvement in multidisciplinary quaternary science, his interests include human-environment interactions during Lateglacial and Holocene times in Britain and Ireland, Norse impacts upon the landscapes of the North Atlantic region, methodology, and the history of science.

Heather S. Pardoe

HEATHER S. PARDOE is a principal curator in the botany section of Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales, responsible for managing the Vascular Plant Section of the Welsh National Herbarium, together with several smaller collections. She took a joint honours degree in biology and geography from the University of Exeter and her PhD degree from University College Cardiff, involving the study of surface pollen deposition on glacier forelands in the Jostedalsbreen-Jotunheimen region, southern Norway. Her interests also include pollen-vegetation relationships and the representation of individual taxa, the post-glacial vegetation history of Europe and the impact of climate change, diversity and plant succession, statistical analysis of vegetation data, the status and distribution of arctic-alpine plants, the history of Welsh vegetation, botanical illustration and the history of botany. She is a founder member of the Pollen Monitoring Programme.