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Notes
1 A.C. Brown (ed.) A History of Scientific Endeavour in South Africa (Cape Town: Royal Society of South Africa, 1977), p. vii.
2 G. Branch, ‘Biographical memoir: Alexander Claude Brown FRSSAf, 1931–2005’ in Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, Vol. 60, No. 1, 2005, pp. 54–55. George Branch, currently Emeritus Professor, Department of Zoology, University of Cape Town, was a colleague of Brown's and a distinguished and widely published marine biologist. Brown's colleagues and friends included an appreciation of Brown, in A.C. Brown, ‘Centennial history of the Zoology Department, University of Cape Town 1903–2003: A personal memoir’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2003, p. 23.
3 A.C. Brown and A. McLachlan, Ecology of Sandy Shores (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990).
4 The full history of the Royal Society of South Africa and its origins in Cape Town in the 1820s is discussed by J. Carruthers, ‘Scientists in society: A history of the Royal Society of South Africa’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, Vol. 63, No. 1, 2008, pp. 1–30. In 1877, a new Society – the South African Philosophical Society – was founded to promote what was broadly referred to at that time as ‘science’ and began publication of the Transactions of the South African Philosophical Society.
5 Illtyd Buller Pole Evans (1879–1968), a Cambridge-trained mycologist, joined the Department of Agriculture in the Transvaal Colony in 1905. After Union in 1910 he headed the Division of Mycology and Plant Pathology in the Union Department of Agriculture. He founded the Botanical Survey in 1918 as well as a number of scientific botanical journals. He was responsible for the National Herbarium being headquartered in Pretoria, a development that was unpopular with his colleagues in Cape Town who had wanted it to be housed at Kirstenbosch. Pole Evans also established a number of botanical experimental stations and was a prime mover for the conservation of the Dongola Wild Life Sanctuary in the 1940s (J. Carruthers, ‘The Dongola Wild Life Sanctuary: “psychological blunder, economic folly and political monstrosity” or “more valuable than rubies and gold”?’, Kleio, Vol. 24 1992, pp. 82–100; Human Sciences Research Council, Dictionary of South African Biography, Vol. V (Pretoria: HSRC, 1987), pp. 599–601).
6 Scottish-trained John D.F. Gilchrist (1866–1926) was appointed marine biologist of the government of the Cape of Good Hope in 1896 and subsequently Government Biologist. He instituted a marine biological survey of the Cape and Natal colonies. He was Professor of Zoology at the South African College and University of Cape Town (1905–1927), President of the Philosophical Society of South Africa (1898–1905), President of the Royal Society of South Africa (1918–1922), and an honorary secretary of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science (Human Sciences Research Council, Dictionary of South African Biography, Vol. I (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1968), pp. 309–310; A.C. Brown, ‘Centennial history of the Zoology Department, University of Cape Town 1903–2003: A personal memoir’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2003, pp. 11–34).
7 Paul Daniel Hahn (1849–1918), born in Bethanien in what is now Namibia, was educated as a chemist in Germany, London and Edinburgh. He became Jamison professor of experimental physics and practical chemistry at the South African College in 1876 and in the same year was elected to the Council of the University of the Cape of Good Hope (forerunner of the University of South Africa). He was Professor of Chemistry at the College until 1918 and was a leading proponent in the establishment of the University of Cape Town that took place in the same year. A person of wide-ranging interests, Hahn was a keen music-lover, was involved in improving numerous agricultural crops, in forestry, in government laboratories and in science and law (Human Sciences Research Council, Dictionary of South African Biography, Vol. I (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1968), pp. 346–347).
8 The Reverend G.H.R. Fisk, an amateur herpetologist, was an active Corresponding Member of the Zoological Society of London in the 1880s and, from 1897, a Member of the Philosophical Society of South Africa (Transactions of the Philosophical Society of South Africa, 1905). In 1887, he brought scientific attention to Fisk's House Snake, Lamphrophis fiskii, a species endemic to the South Western Cape, and named in Fisk's honour by G.A. Boulenger of the Natural History Museum in London, a matter recorded by the Zoological Society in its Proceedings of 5 April 1887. Fisk was the chaplain at the Breakwater Convict Station in Cape Town and he assisted Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd with the selection of suitable San (Bushman) informants for their philological studies.
9 H.G. Seeley (1839–1909), a London-born geologist and palaeontologist, was interested in many branches of natural history. He was encouraged in his passion for geology and for fossils by Sir Richard Owen, and in 1859 he worked with the renowned Cambridge professor of geology Adam Sedgwick, both in museums and in the field. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, he published widely in his field, and these included 59 papers on his findings in South Africa. According to the Dictionary of National Biography (1912 Supplement), he spent time in the Cape Colony investigating the geological horizons whence Anomodonts had been obtained, and was fortunate in finding in the Karroo a practically complete skeleton of Pareiasaurus (Human Sciences Research Council, Dictionary of South African Biography, Vol. II. (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1972), p. 64.)
10 Botanist Robert Stephen Adamson (1885–1965) was Bolus Professor of Botany at the University of Cape Town from 1923 to 1950. His major contributions were in botanical ecology and biogeography but he was also an accomplished taxonomist. He was President of the Royal Society of South Africa from 1946 to 1948 (M. Gunn and L.E. Codd, eds, Botanical Exploration of Southern Africa (Cape Town: Balkema, 1981), pp. 77–78).
11 A shy Welshman, Edgar Newbery was Mally Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Cape Town from 1919 to 1946 and President of the Royal Society of South Africa in 1957. He was a specialist in the problem of overvoltage and was legendary for his ingenuity in constructing his required apparatus (H. Phillips, The University of Cape Town 1918–1948: The formative years (Cape Town: UCT Press, Citation1993), pp. 49–50).
12 The year 1977 was the Centenary of the Philosophical Society of South Africa, not the Royal Society of South Africa, which gained its name and its Charter in 1908. See J. Carruthers, ‘Scientists in society: A history of the Royal Society of South Africa’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, Vol. 63, No. 1, 2008, pp. 1–30.
13 Brown left this sentence unfinished. Commander Wilfred John Copenhagen, OBE and King's Commendation (1895–1982) was both a prominent naval officer and a notable scientist. A product of the South African College and a committed naval man, in 1942 he commanded the South Africa Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, from which he rose to become the commanding officer of South Africa's first naval base, HMSAS Unitie, in Cape Town. More remarkably, he was also a productive scientist, working in areas as diverse as the collection of phytoplankton, the adaptability of the Natal crawfish, the mysterious sulphurous mudbanks which arise suddenly off South Africa's west coast, the restoration of corroded artefacts salvaged from wrecks off the South African coast and, the research for which he is now largely remembered, his work in countering marine corrosion, especially of the hulls of South African naval vessels. As Brown has made clear, to all who knew him he was also in every way a larger-than-life character. (Obituaries in the Cape Times and Cape Argus and unpublished biographical note by Commander W.M. Bisset, SAN.) (Footnote contributed by P. Spargo.)
14 Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer (1907–2004) was a curator at the East London Museum when, around Christmas-time in 1938, a fishing vessel brought the capture of a coelacanth to her attention. It was later identified by J.L.B. Smith. (S. Weinberg, A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth (London: Fourth Estate, 1999) and named Latimeria chalmunae for Courtenay-Latimer.
15 The Royal Society of South Africa has named its junior medal for Meiring Naudé (1904–1985). Naudé was a champion of modern scientific organisation and a promoter of young South African scientific talent.
16 Levyns was President of the Society in 1962.
17 As Pearson died in 1916, Levyns (née Mitchell and the first woman to be awarded a DSc from the University of Cape Town in 1929) joined the Department of Botany at a time when there was no incumbent of the Chair of Botany. Henry H.W. Pearson (1870–1916) was the first Professor of Botany at the South African College in 1903 and the first Honorary Director of the National Botanic Gardens at Kirstenbosch. After his death, the Botany Department was headed by Edith Stephens as Acting-Professor (H. Phillips, The University of Cape Town 1918–1948: The Formative Years (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1993), pp. 50–53).
18 William John Burchell (1781–1863), naturalist, traveller and artist, was a prolific collector of southern Africa's fauna and flora between 1810 and 1815. He is best known for his two volumes entitled Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (London, 1824). The Swede Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828), a pupil of Linnaeus, also explored southern Africa extensively, collecting specimens of natural history in the years 1772 to 1774. His work appeared in English between 1794 and 1795 in four volumes entitled Travels in Europe, Africa and Asia Performed between the Years 1770 and 1779 … (London).
19 Francis Guthrie (1831–1899) taught mathematics at Graff-Reinet College but also gave lectures in botany. Guthrie followed Bolus to Cape Town, practised at the Bar for a time, and from 1876 to 1898 was Professor of Mathematics at the South African College (M. Gunn and L.E. Codd, eds, Botanical Exploration of Southern Africa (Cape Town: Balkema, 1981), p. 175).
20 At the time, the University of Cape Town had not yet been established, and the collections and the Chair (named for Bolus who had richly endowed it) were given to the South African College. Bolus's honorary DSc was awarded by the University of the Cape of Good Hope.
21 Edgar L. Layard (1824–1900) arrived in the Cape on the staff of Sir George Grey in 1854, the following year he became part-time curator of the South African Museum. He distinguished himself as a pioneering and extremely thorough ornithologist of South African and other birds. He resigned from the Museum in 1872 (Human Sciences Research Council, Dictionary of South African Biography, Vol. I (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1968), pp. 467–468.)
22 Skaife was born 1889 and died in 1976. In 1922 he received one of the first three PhDs from the University of Cape Town (A.C. Brown, ‘Centennial history of the Zoology Department, University of Cape Town 1903–2003: A personal memoir’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2003, p. 12).
23 The South Africa medal of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
24 Described by Wikipedia (accessed 28 December 2013) as a ‘South African-American virologist’, Max Theiler (1899–1972) was awarded the Nobel Prize for developing a vaccine against yellow fever in 1937. After completing his medical degree in South Africa, Max Theiler continued his education in London before moving permanently to the United States.
25 Smuts, a believer in eugenics, published Holism and Evolution in 1926 as well as a number of papers on scientific matters (archaeology, botany and palaeontology in particular) in addition to delivering many addresses to learned societies on scientific subjects.
26 This aspect of the life of Smuts was given detailed treatment by Piet Beukes in Smuts: The Botanist (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1996).
27 Christiaan Barnard (1922–2001) performed the first successful human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town in 1967, thus earning international acclaim.
28 The University Act referred to here is that which established the University of Cape Town as an entity separate from the University of the Cape of Good Hope, thus emerging as a fully-fledged and independent university. The politics around the first universities in South Africa and their relative status were extremely contentious owing to inter- and intra-provincial rivalry, the matter of the fate of a substantial bequest from Alfred Beit, and the question of language of instruction. Discussion around matters of higher education in South Africa began after the South African War of 1899–1902 when all four polities became British colonies and generated even more heat, and further delay, after Union in 1910. Only in 1916, when the Alfred Beit bequest – augmented by donations from Otto Beit and Julius Wernher – was due to expire, was the matter partly resolved with the passing of the University of South Africa Act, the University of Stellenbosch Act and the University of Cape Town Act that year. Other universities were to follow in subsequent years. The 1916 Act came into effect for the University of Cape Town on 2 April 1918 (H. Phillips, The University of Cape Town 1918–1948: The Formative Years (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1993), pp. 1–6.)
29 Here Brown is referring to the South African College in Cape Town that was, in 1918, awarded full university status as the University of Cape Town. In 1911 the Scottish anatomist R.B. Thomson had been appointed Professor of medical science.
30 Many of the medical students at the South African College and its successor, the University of Cape Town, were Jewish.
31 Hogben's first wife was Enid Charles (1894–1972) who, as a socialist and feminist, retained her maiden name after her marriage. She earned her PhD in physiology at the University of Cape Town, but was also a statistician, trained at the University of Cambridge. Her major work related to population studies and anti-eugenics in Canada and the UK and she later became Regional Advisor for the World Health Organisation. She separated from Hogben in 1953 and they divorced in 1957 (Wikipedia, accessed 30 December 2013).
32 A different perspective on Hogben is provided by Howard Phillips, historian of the University of Cape Town, and also by G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the renowned ecologist, who was befriended by Hogben in the mid-1920s. Philips records the University of Cape Town's desire to move zoology away from the detailed marine studies favoured by Gilchrist and Von Bonde and thus appointed a young and dynamic professor who exemplified the new trend of experimental biology, despite his ‘tempestuous personality and advanced socialism’ (p. 57). Hogben was ‘the most stimulating man at UCT’ according to one of the many talented postgraduate students who undertook pioneering work in genetics and physiology under his tutelage. Students flocked to his revolutionary syllabus and his thought-provoking lectures, with the consequence that the Department of Zoology had to be augmented by additional staff and laboratories. Not surprisingly, others – those recorded here by Brown – disliked him intensely. Hogben and Charles were known to be very sympathetic to Africans and one reason for their leaving South Africa was the couple's abhorrence of the growing segregationist and apartheid policies of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Hogben and his students acquitted themselves well during the 1929 visit to South Africa of the British Association of the Advancement of Science, and his growing reputation in Britain – equal to that of J.B.S. Haldane, or Julian Huxley – earned him the first Chair of Social Biology at the London School of Economics in 1930, where he campaigned against eugenics. Afterwards he moved to universities at Aberdeen and Birmingham, the War Office during the war, and finally the University of Guyana, before retiring to Wales. Believing that the responsibility of science was to educate and improve society, as well as scholarly papers he wrote best-selling books, including Mathematics for the Million (1936) and Science for the Citizen (1938). In addition, he invented Interglossa, a language that is rather like Esperanto (H. Phillips, The University of Cape Town 1918–1948: The Formative Years (Cape Town: UCT Press, Citation1993), pp. 57–59; J. Carruthers, ‘G. Evelyn Hutchinson in South Africa, 1926 to 1928: “An immense part in my intellectual development”’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, Vol. 66, No. 2, 2011, pp. 87–104; A.C. Brown, ‘Centennial history of the Zoology Department, University of Cape Town 1903–2003: A personal memoir’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2003, pp. 14–15).
33 Goddard (1883–1948) earned the first PhD from the University of Sydney in 1910. While under his Professorship, the Department of Zoology at the University of Stellenbosch (formerly Victoria College) became the largest in South Africa. Having arrived in the Cape at the time of Union, he left Stellenbosch when the growing power of Afrikaner Nationalists became apparent. They were to win the watershed election of 1924. Later Goddard became Professor of Biology at the University of Queensland and Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture. Active in establishing faculties of agriculture, dentistry, veterinary science and medicine, he also chaired many societies including the Royal Society of Queensland, the Queensland Naturalists' Club, the Queensland branch of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science, the Entomological Society of Queensland and the Australian-American Association. (Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 9 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press), 1983).
34 Clarence van Riet Lowe, known as Peter (1894–1956), was a civil engineer who became a widely-published academic archaeologist. He was Director of the Bureau of Archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Human Sciences Research Council, Dictionary of South African Biography, Vol. IV. (Durban: Butterworth, 1981), pp. 325–326). Neville Jones, a pioneering Rhodesian amateur archaeologist, worked at a number of southern African sites – including Mapungubwe in the 1930s. He coined the term ‘Middle Stone Age’.
35 Brown left this sentence unfinished. Simpson was an outstanding scientist, who had studied at the University of Cape Town and the University of Cambridge (where he obtained his PhD) and was highly regarded in international scientific circles where he held numerous posts over the years.
36 Purcell is not included in the Dictionary of South African Biography but he does rate a Wikipedia entry (accessed 29 December 2013).
37 At the time of Brown's writing, the future of the Dictionary of South African Biography was in jeopardy. An extremely useful reference tool, it suffered from being expensive to produce and from its being Euro-centric and Afrikaner Nationalist in focus and thus inimical to the broader interests of South Africa after 1994. Two paperback volumes of the renamed New Dictionary of South African Biography attempted to rectify the omission of black South Africans in 1995 and 1999 but no further volumes have appeared.