Marshall Avery Howe

Marshall Avery Howe (June 6, 1867 – December 24, 1936) was an American botanist, taxonomist, morphologist, and curator, known for his research on liverworts and algae. He was from 1901 to 1936 a member of the scientific staff of the New York Botanical Garden and served as its director from October 1935 to December 1936. Howe was elected in 1923 to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Quotes

• Occasional Hepaticae were collected within the state from 1850 to 1880 by Dr. Albert Kellogg, Dr. J. M. Bigelow, Professor William H. Brewer, Professor John Torrey, Dr. C. C. Parry, and Dr. Edward Palmer. It was, however, Dr. Henry N. Bolander, who did much more than all the others to pave the way to a knowledge of the Californian hepatics. ... Suffice it to say that he was a resident of California from 1861 to 1878, and that while giving no more attention to cryptogamous plants than to the spermatophytes, his eye for mosses, liverworts, and lichens was astonishly keen. He not only explored with much thoroughness the San Francisco Bay region, but as botanist of the State Geological Survey, and later as State Superintendent of Schools, was enabled to visit more remote portions of the state. Fully half the species in the California hepatic list were known to him. Of these, at least twelve were new to hepaticology; seven now bear his name.
  • The Hepaticae and Anthocerotes of California. Volume 7 of Memoirs of the Torrey Botanical Club, ISSN 0097-3807. Columbia University. 1899. p. 2.  (208 pages)

• The possible economic importance of the marine algae has been emphasized of late by the investigations that have been carried on by the U. S. Department of Agriculture as their use as a source of "potash" for agricultural fertilizers. The kelps of the Pacific coast of the United States in particular are the subject of several taxonomic, biologic, and chemical papers published in a recent report on "Fertilizer Resources of the United States."* ...
  *Senate Document No. 190, 62d Congress, 1912.
  • The Marine Algae of Peru. Volume 15 of Memoirs of the Torrey Botanical Club. Press of the New Era Printing Company. 1914. p. 3.  (185 pages)

• The plants named in the following brief report were collected on the western coast of Cuba in May and June, 1914, by Mr. John B. Henderson, Regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and Dr. Paul Bartsch, Division of Marine Invertebrates, of the United States National Museum. An illustrated popular account of the expedition has been written by Mr. Henderson and published in book form under the title, “The Cruise of the Tomas Barrera,” the expedition taking its name from that of the Cuban schooner generously placed at the disposal of the explorers by its owners. The collecting of algae was incidental to the activities of the expedition in zoological lines, and while the list of marine algae obtained is not a long one it is longer than any hitherto published for the island of Cuba and includes a considerable number of species not hitherto attributed to this island, though some of the latter are represented in unreported collections made by the writer in the vicinity of Guantanamo Bay in 1909.
  • The Marine Algae and Marine Spermatophytes of the Tomas Barrera Expedition to Cuba. Volume 2491 of Publications, Smithsonian Institution; Volume 68, Issue 11 of Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. Smithsonian institution. April 1918. p. 1.  (13 pages)

Quotes about Marshall Avery Howe

• In 1900, he visited Bermuda; in 1901 he explored certain coasts of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland; in 1903, the Florida coasts were his objective and were touched again incidentally in 1904, 1909, and in 1914; Porto Rico in 1903 and again in I915 ; the Bahama Islands in 1904 and 1908; Jamaica in I907 and 1909; Panama and Colon in 1910; and Cuba in 1915. From all these and other places, Howe brought back a wealth of algae and other plants for both the material and scientific uses of his institution. Through his recommendation and through the private generosity of Director Britton, various algal herbaria were obtained in their entirety. such as that of Nicolas Pike, containing many specimens early collected from both coasts of North America and from the Island of Mauritius; that of the pioneer phycologist, Dr. C. L. Anderson of Santa Cruz, California, containing much of the California algal flora; and that of Frank S. Collins of Malden, Mass., fairly complete as to New England algae, North American Pacific Coast algae, and a wealth of exotic algae from all coasts of the world obtained by Collins in his exchanges with prominent collectors and phycological authorities of most of the civilized countries. In all, the collections of Algae at the Garden were augmented to 78,229 specimens and those of Hepaticae to 59,240 specimens during Howe's curatorship.
  • William Albert Setchell, (1938) . "Biographical Memoir of Marshall Avery Howe, 1867–1936". Biographical Memoirs of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences 19: 243–269. (quote from p. 250)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Marshall Avery Howe on Wikipedia