Charles C. Adams, 1873–1955

1HARLES C. ADAMS was born in Clinton, . Illinois, on July 23, 1873, and died at Albany, New York, May 22, 1955. He obtained a bachelor's degree at Illinois Wesleyan College in 1895, and the degree of Master of Science at Harvard in 1899. He then studied at the University of Chicago from 1900 to 1903, where he took his doctorate. At Chicago he was at the center in which American ecology and ecological biogeography were being developed under the leadership of Henry Chandler Cowles and his students. There also he came under the influence of Rollin D. Salisbury, an extraordinarily inspiring teacher in the earth sciences. For a period of years following his graduate work he held varied research and curatorial positions in universities and other institutions in the Middle West, and in 1914 he took a position as Forest Zoologist at the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse. Adams remained in the New York State service until his retirement in 1943. He directed the Roosevelt Wildlife Experiment Station from 1919 to 1926, and in the latter year became Director of the New York State Museum at Albany. Soon after leaving Chicago he had become interested in museum work, and this was a primary interest throughout the remainder of his life. He saw in the field of ecology what he considered to be an outstanding medium for teaching and museum demonstration in the natural sciences. Many of his later publications were in support of this idea. A bibliography of his publications totals 154 titles. Their subject matter is extremely varied, from research papers on fresh water mollusks to such things as the Application of Biologic Research Methods to Urban Areal Problems. He was active in several scientific societies, and was one of the early members of the Association of American Geographers. He served as second vice-president of the Association in 1913, and as vice-president in 1927. In 1916 he was one of the founders of the Ecological Society of America, and was its president in 1923. He had a large correspondence, and accumulated an extensive personal library of books and reprints. All of this material has been given by his daughter to Western Michigan College at Kalamazoo, where it forms the nucleus of what has become known as the Charles C. Adams Center for Ecological Studies, located in the Department of Biology at that school. There were in his files at the time of his death sizeable residues of reprints of his own published papers, even of the earlier ones. The recently established Center, through its director, Dr. Daniel F. Jackson, has made these reprints freely available to institutions and individuals. It is probable that Dr. Adams was most widely known for his publications in the field of animal ecology, for his attempts to apply ecological research methods to the problems of human communities, and for his continual emphasis upon ecology as a teaching mechanism. The conceptual difficulties involved in the construction of rationales in all these areas were, and are, formidable; and he met them with integrity and humor. Appreciations of his efforts with them, published since his death, are evidence of the high esteem accorded him by ecologists.' On the other hand, some of his earlier research in biogeography may, in larger perspective, prove to be of equal significance. One of his major research papers, published as a Memoir in the National Academy of Sciences in 1915, is on the Variations and Ecological Distribution of the Snails of the Genus lo. This genus of snails inhabits only the upper reaches of the Tennessee River in southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and northern Alabama. Adams did a great deal of field work on them himself, and had access to a large quantity of earlier collections. He made careful studies of variations within species, and related these variations to distribution patterns. From his studies he was able to define certain dines of variation within and among the species occurring at various levels in the valleys of the rivers inhabited by the

Archaeology · Bachelor · Environmental ethics · Library science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Wildlife · Conservation, Ecology, Wildlife Education · Ecology · Fish Ecology and Management Studies · History · Philosophy · Species Distribution and Climate Change

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