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The Hopkins Seaside Laboratory (1892-1917)

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CHAPTER 8

MEMORIAL RESOLUTION

GEORGE CLINTON PRICE (1860 – 1950)1

Dr. George Clinton Price died at his home on the Stanford Campus on August 11, 1950 at the age of slightly more than ninety years. His death removes one of the few remaining links with the early history of the institution, his having joined the faculty in 1892. He thus failed by only one year of being one of the "Old Guard" who were with the University from its opening, in 1891. He was born May 30, 1860 and spent his early years on a farm in Jackson Township, Tippecanoe County, Indiana. His early schooling was in the local schools, but in September, 1881 he entered the preparatory school of what was then called Asbury University and was later to become DePauw University. He dropped out of school in December 1883 and in 1884-85 he taught school at Odell, Indiana and in 1885-87 at Sugar Grove, Indiana. In the fall of 1886 he returned to DePauw, where he was a student of the late Dr. 0. P. Jenkins who became head of the Physiology Department at Stanford University.  It was during this period that he became interested in Biology through reading the works of Thomas Henry Huxley.

In the summer of 1889 he went in company with Dr. Jenkins and one of his schoolmates to the Hawaiian Islands, where they engaged in collecting fish. On his return to the United States he was appointed to teach Geology at DePauw while still an undergraduate. He graduated from DePauw in 1890 and that year entered Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student in Biology. In the summer of 1891 he accompanied a party of students to Jamaica, where their time was spent in collecting and studying the animals. During this time at Johns Hopkins he became a close friend of Dr. J. M. McFarland, who was later for many years on the Stanford faculty. In 1892 he taught in the summer school of DePauw University and then came to Stanford, where he had been appointed as assistant in Zoology and began his long association with this University. In 1895 he went to Germany to the University of Munich, where he studied Embryology for a year, returning to Stanford in 1896. He was granted the Ph.D. from Stanford in 1897. In December 1899 he married Edith Basye, whom he had met while at DePauw and who survived him in company with his son, John Price, who was born in 1906. During the year of 1903-1904 he and Mrs. Price engaged in a journey about Europe, traveling in England, France, Switzerland, and Italy and spent part of the time in the laboratory of Oscar Hertwig, one of the leading biologists of the period, at the University of Berlin. Coming back to the United States he worked for a time at the Harvard Medical School. Also, during the second semester of 1911, he worked at Harvard in the laboratory of Professor Minot.

For 23 years, from 1893 to 1915, he taught in nearly all the summer sessions of the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford at Pacific Grove, and until the time of his retirement he was especially concerned with the teaching of elementary Zoology and Embryology in the then Department of Zoology at the University. He retired in 1935. Throughout his period of service to the University, which lasted 33 years, his main interest was in teaching and his one-time students remember him as an extraordinary elementary teacher, possessed of an infinite fund of patience and kindness and a great ability to illustrate by drawing and modeling in clay the most intricate problems of vertebrate embryology. Those who had the experience of starting their work in Zoology under him remember him as a genuinely great teacher.

After his retirement he maintained his residence on the campus, and, as long as he was physically able, he came to his office and laboratory in Jordan Hall where he worked on the embryology of the salmon. His passing removes one of the few persons still remaining who were familiar with the early days and the early struggles of the University and is regretted by his former students, to whom he was a friend as well as a teacher, in the days when the institution was still small and the relations of students and their instructors could still be personal and intimate to a degree that is now denied to all but a small proportion of advanced and graduate students.

G. F. Ferris David L. Bassett Arthur Giese
 

Dr. George Clinton Price participated in sixteen of the twenty-three years regular sessions of the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory. In the position of Instructor in the summers of 1893, 1894, 1895; in the position of Instructor in Charge during the summers of 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1914 and 1915 and Occupying an Investigators Room during the summer of 1910.
 

MEMORIAL RESOLUTION

FRANK MACE MACFARLAND (1869-1951) 2

Frank Mace MacFarland, Emeritus Professor of Histology at Stanford University, and a member of its faculty for almost sixty years, died suddenly in San Francisco on February 21st. He was attending the first meeting of the California Academy of Sciences in its new auditorium which be had been instrumental in planning.

Dr. MacFarland was born in Centralia, Illinois, on June 10, 1869, the son of Dr. Parker M. and Sarah Elizabeth (Mace) MacFarland. He received his Bachelor's degree from DePauw University in 1889, his Master's from Stanford in 1893 and his doctorate from the University of Wurzburg in l896. In Europe he studied at various centers of learning., including Freiburg, Zurich, Wurzburg and the famous biological station at Naples. His genial disposition and unusually wide scientific interests brought him a wide and intimate acquaintance with many of the most distinguished biologists of the period. In later years his reminiscences of European university life and famous personalities in Europe at the close of the last century were a delight to his younger colleagues.

In the early summer of 1892 Dr. MacFarland and his lifelong friend, the late Professor George Clinton Price, came to Stanford as instructors and advanced students, less than a year after the University first opened. During his long association with the university, Dr. MacFarland contributed much to its development. He played a leading role in organizing the Hopkins Marine Biological Station at Pacific Grove, of which he was in charge from 1910 to 1913 and co-director from 1915 to 1917, and in which he maintained an active interest throughout the remainder of his life.

On August 27, 1902, he married Miss Olive Knowles Hornbrook who has devotedly assisted and participated in his extensive studies, both as a skilled technician and as an artist whose delicate watercolor drawings have illustrated many of his scientific publications. Long and intensive study of the nudibranchs, a large group of marine molluscs of beautiful colors and bizarre forms, brought Dr. MacFarland world-wide recognition as the greatest authority on the life and habits of these animals. At the time of his death, he was bringing to completion a comprehensive monograph on the group.

In addition to membership in many other scientific organizations both in this country and abroad, Professor MacFarland was very actively associated with the California Academy of Sciences, of which he was successively, corresponding secretary, first vice-president, and for fourteen years its president. Following his retirement from teaching he also served for five years as acting director of the museum and the Steinhart Aquarium. In 1946 he was made honorary member of the Academy, the highest honor the Academy can bestow. He was an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society, a corresponding member of the Malacological Society of London, and of numerous other learned societies. Doctor MacFarland rendered long and distinguished service to Stanford, both as a stimulating and effective teacher and as an outstanding investigator.  In his death, Stanford has lost another of that goodly company, its early faculty, whose labors contributed so much toward making it a great university.

Lawrence Rogers Blinks Lowell Turrentine
William Walter Greulich, Chairman


Dr. Frank Mace MacFarland participated in thirteen of the twenty-three years regular sessions of the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory. In the position of Assistant to Instructor in the summers of 1892; in the position of Instructor during the summers of 1893, 1894, 1898, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1905; in the position of Instructor in Charge during the summers of 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913 and Occupying an Investigators Room during the summer of 1897
 

MEMORIAL RESOLUTION

HAROLD HEATH (1868 – 1951)3

Harold Heath, Professor Emeritus of Embryology, died at Pacific Grove, April 22, 1951, at the age of 82. While not quite one of the original faculty of Stanford, he joined the department of zoology as Instructor in 1894, and practically his entire scientific life was spent at the university campus and at the Hopkins Marine Station. Hundreds of zoology and pre-medical students came under his inspiring scientific and personal influence.

Harold Heath was born in Vevay, Indiana, the son of Charles Wesley and Sarah Ann Heath, June 5, 1868. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1893, having also instructed in biology there from 1890 to 1893.

There followed a year as Professor of Biology at College of the Pacific, and two years as instructor at Stanford. He then pursued graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, holding a Harrison Fellowship there in study under the famous Prof. E. G. Conklin. He there obtained his M.A. and Ph.D., the latter in 1898. His alma mater, Wesleyan, awarded him an honorary Sc.D. in 1919.

Dr. Heath returned to Stanford as Assistant Professor of Zoology in 1898, became Associate Professor in 1904, and Professor in 1909. He participated in many scientific expeditions, among them those of the "Albatross," in U.S. Fish Commission investigations of the salmon on the Alaska Coast in 1903, along the California coast in 1904, and to Japan in 1906. He spent the summers of 1910 and 1917 in fur seal investigations on the Pribilof Islands, was on the Stanford expedition to Brazil in 1911, and at Forrester Island in 1913. During his last trip to Alaska, he was severely injured in a fall over a glacial cliff. Dr. Heath's connection with the Hopkins Marine Station began in 1895; he was instructor in the summer course there from 1895 to 1900. He taught again in 1919 and regularly every summer from 1924 onwards. He became a resident member of the Marine Station staff in 1925, and was made Professor of Embryology in 1931. He retired in 1933, but carried on scientific work, especially in connection with the Pacific Grove Municipal Museum for many years until failing health curtailed these activities. But he still retained a keen interest in people and affairs, and it was a pleasure for members of the Marine Station staff to visit him at his home facing the laboratory and the sea.

Dr. Heath's scientific publications were numerous, in the fields of invertebrate zoology and embryology. His monograph on the Solenogastres (of the Albatross expeditions) beautifully illustrated from his own drawings is perhaps outstanding. Other important work included the development of Ischnochiton, and a description of Polyclads of Monterey Bay. During his later years he was especially interested in the termites. But these are only a few of his many zoological works.

As a teacher he was pre-eminent: kindly, quizzical, and inspiring. He collaborated with Professors Burlingame, Martin and Peirce in installing Stanford's very successful General Biology course, and he helped write the textbook for it. He contributed greatly to Stanford's high position in the biological sciences. This was recognized by his "starred" position as one of the 1000 outstanding scientists (150 zoologists) in the first edition of "American Men of Science." He was a member of the Western Society of Naturalists, Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, American Society of Zoologists, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Heath married Elsie Shelley of San Jose in 1897. She survives him, as do two sons Ronald W. Heath and James P. Heath, a daughter Mrs. Phyllis Heath Walker, a sister Mrs. Mary Heath Lee, and seven grandchildren.

William B. Owens Arthur C. Giese
Lawrence R. Blinks (Chairman)
 

Dr. Harold Heath participated in ten of the twenty-three years of regular sessions of the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory. As a participating Stanford student in the summer of 1894; in the position of Instructor during the summers of 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1909, 1910; in the position of Instructor in Charge during the summer of 1909 and Occupying Investigators Room during the summers of 1901 and 1902.
 

MEMORIAL RESOLUTION

CLARA S. STOLTENBERG (1865 – 1950)4

Clara S. Stoltenberg, Professor Emeritus of Anatomy, Stanford University died at her home on Salvatierra Street in Stanford, California on February 2, 1950, after a prolonged illness. She was born in Iowa on August 30, 1865. Her early education was received mainly in Los Angeles, after which she became a successful teacher in the public schools of that City. In 1892 she entered Stanford University as a student majoring in Education, but soon her interests centered in the Biological Sciences, mainly in Physiology and Histology, graduating with the degree of A.B. in January, 1896, and M. A. of in June, 1897. In the Annual Registers of 1894-95, 1895-¬96 and 1896-97 she and a classmate, Ray Lyman Wilbur, were listed as Laboratory Assistants in Physiology and Histology.

This marked the beginning of a continued friendship with our late Chancellor. She found her greatest interest in the structure and functions of the Nervous System and Sense Organs, in which courses of instruction she was at first associated with Professor Jenkins, but in later years carried them alone.  Beyond the few interruptions for advanced study and research at Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Chicago, her Stanford service was continuous. She was appointed an Instructor in 1897, an Assistant Professor in 1904, an Associate Professor in 1910 and Professor in 1929, retiring in 1930 as Professor Emeritus. Clara Stoltenberg, and Clelia Duel Mosher were the only women to attain the rank of professor during Stanford's first four decades; Stoltenberg and Mosher both filled the rank for one year only, the year before their retirement.

With the further development of the Stanford University School of Medicine, the anatomical and histological branches of the Department of Physiology and Histology were transferred to the Department of Anatomy in 1917, in which Professor Stoltenberg conducted the instruction in human and comparative neurology, the functional activities remaining in the Department of Physiology.
 

Her keen, analytical mind, her scholarly habits of thought, and her broad human sympathies enabled her to present the complex subject clearly and forcefully, gaining for her the high esteem and enthusiasm of her students. As a colleague she was patient, tactful and stimulating, ever willing to bear more than her share of the common burden. This was especially true during the first two decades of the University's life when financial uncertainties and material disasters threatened its very existence. Optimistic and helpful, with never a word of disappointment or discouragement she willingly cooperated in adapting the work of the department to its unexpected limitations.

With the close of her active service in 1930, her intimate contact with students lessened, but she still cherished a deep interest in them and in the University existing for them. Her buoyant enthusiasm, her broad scholarship, her kindly sympathy and her generous understanding added much to the life of the University and of the community in which she lived.

BE IT RESOLVED THEREFORE, that this Memorial of Professor Stoltenberg's exemplary life and achievements be recorded in the minutes of the Academic Council and that a copy be transmitted to her surviving brother.

Victor E. Hall Donald E. King
Edwin W. Schultz, Chairman

Dr. Clara S. Stoltenberg participated in seven of the twenty-three years regular sessions of the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory. As a participating Stanford student in the summer of 1894; in the position of Assistant Instructor during the summers of 1896; in the position of Instructor during the summers of 1906, 1907, 1908 and Occupying Investigators Room during the summer of 1899.
 

MEMORIAL RESOLUTION
TIMOTHY HOPKINS (1859 – 1936)


Timothy Hopkins, the man whose adopted last name would become associated Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, was born Timothy Nolan, the son of Irish immigrants, on March 2, 1859 in Augusta, Maine.(5) His father, Patrick Nolan, born at Glenmore, Ireland in 1829, came to New England in 1852, settled at Winthrop, Maine, where he found employment in an oilcloth shop, and married Catherine Fallon.(6) Three years later, in May of 1862, Patrick Nolan was lured from Maine by the gold fields of California. To earn money for the passage west for his wife and three children - Thomas, Timothy, and their new infant daughter, Margaret - Patrick Nolan took up work as a dockhand in San Francisco.(7) Unfortunately, on the very day that his family set sail for California, Patrick Nolan fell into the San Francisco Bay and drowned. In another level of despair for the widowed Caroline Nolan, was the loss of her infant daughter Margaret, during their voyage to the west taken by way of the Isthmus of Panama.(8)

Arriving destitute in San Francisco, with her two young son’s Timothy and Thomas Nolan, the widowed Caroline Nolan traveled to Sacramento and found work tending to the household of railroad magnate Mark Hopkins and his wife, Mary Frances Sherwood Hopkins. As a child, Timothy Nolan often visited his mother while she worked at the Hopkins residence. Mark and Mary Hopkins, themselves childless, were delighted by the young boy who they increasingly treated as a member of the family and welcomed him to live in their home.(9) About that time, Mark Hopkins became identified with the great overland railroad enterprise, which brought the family a significant amount of wealth.(10)

Growing up in Hopkins’ household, Timothy Nolan was provided with a fine education, attending public school in Sacramento and the Urban Academy of San Francisco, where he was prepared for Harvard University.(11)   In short time, Timothy Nolan became a friend of Hopkins' neighbor and business partner, Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Stanford.(12)

The death of Mark Hopkins in 1878 changed the life of the young Timothy Nolan, forcing the cancellation of his plans to attend Harvard University, and taking up an active role in management of the Hopkins financial affairs.(13) Court proceedings were quickly arranged that allowed Mrs. Mary Hopkins to formally adopt Timothy Nolan as her son in 1879. In November of 1882, the “now” Timothy Hopkins married the niece of his adopted mother, Mary Kellogg Crittenden in New York City.(14)

In January 1883, Timothy Hopkins, at the age of twenty-four, was next made treasurer of the Central Pacific Railroad. In this position, Tim Hopkins gained the experience that would serve him well in later years as an officer and director of some of the largest industrial and financial enterprises of California.(15) In 1884, Timothy Hopkins was appointed by the founders of Leland Stanford Junior University to be one of the original Board of Trustees, a position he served continuously throughout his life.(16) Whether it was due to his position as a trustee of the new university or because of his summer residence nearby, Timothy Hopkins, with the Leland Stanfords' support, purchased the land that would become Palo Alto. The new town was laid out in 1887 and named University Park. The name Palo Alto was not adopted until 1892. (17)

Both Timothy and his wife Mary Kellogg Crittenden Hopkins were among the staunchest supporters of the University and of its founders.(18) At the very beginning of the University's work in 1891, Timothy Hopkins provided a portion of the funds necessary to build and equip the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory of Natural History in Pacific Grove, California.(19) In the early 1890s, Hopkins resigned his railroad positions and devoted his time to other business interests and to the young university. He became a major supporter of the university, especially in the years after Leland Stanford's death, when funds were scarce.(20) At the same time he presented to the University his valuable railway library of 15,000 bound volumes and pamphlets, one of the most complete in existence. He also made large gifts to the library and museum of biology and has maintained a series of publications. (21)

During his lifetime, Timothy Hopkins was president of the Southern Pacific Milling Company, a director of the Wells Fargo Bank and Union Trust Company, a life member of the board of trustees of Leland Stanford, Jr., University, and had served as a director of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, and the Union Ice Company. He was a life member of the University Club and a member of the higher order of Masonry.(22) When Timothy Hopkins died in 1936, he left approximately one million dollars in a trust, and designated that sixty per cent of its income be used to maintain the library, research and development of the Hopkins Marine Station.(23)
 

EPILOGUE

In the summer of 1891, when David Starr Jordan visited Pacific Grove and participated in his first Chautauqua Assembly, he was introduced to what was then California’s first and only “summer school of science.” Since 1880, the Pacific Coast Branch of the Chautauqua Literary and Science Circle had organized an annual assembly in Pacific Grove. From the beginning, the founders of this daughter Chautauqua placed a strong emphasis on the instruction of natural history to the participants of the two-week summer assembly. As the Chautauqua program was originally established to advance the training of Sunday school teachers, it was not surprising to find that majority of participants of the Pacific Grove Assembly were schoolteachers, most of whom were women. The instruction provided during this assembly must have appeared to Jordan to be the aspiration his mentor Louis Agassiz had spent a lifetime attempting to inspire the nation’s education system to embrace. Having participated in both sessions of the Anderson School of Natural History, Jordan immediately recognized the opportunity to advance the study of nature from the southern end of Monterey Bay, California in a similar manner Agassiz’s had directed his efforts on Penikese Island. As such, from his position as President of the newly established Leland Stanford University, efforts were quickly directed to the organizing of a seaside laboratory.

For twenty-five years, the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory provided the opportunity for the academic instruction of inquiry-based observation and a direct “hands-on” approach to learning for students and schoolteachers alike. Beyond the instruction of the proper method of study of nature, the seaside laboratory provided the opportunity to advance scientific research along the Pacific Coast of California and beyond. Among the students who acquired a lasting impression through their participation in course work and independent research conducted at the seaside laboratory was Ray Lyman Wilbur. As the third president of Stanford University, Ray Lyman Wilbur would build upon his summer experience at Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, with the establishment of the Hopkins Marine Station on China Point.