3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

Personality and General Views 285
made any deprecatory remarks about him, but wondered for years why he gave me
the cold shoulder.”
As a result, when visiting the Museum of Comparative Zoology during the
1930s, Mayr was never invited to Barbour’s “Eateria”, a kind of a salon at the
museum, where he provided catered luncheons to a few favored staff members
and visiting guests. Another reason for this treatment probably was that Mayr, as
“Sanford’s boy”, belonged to the competitive camp (see p. 100). Barbour developed
a greatly improved opinion after Mayr had destroyed the arguments for land
bridges between the islands of the Malay Archipelago (p. 181). Upon reading the
above letter in 1995 again, Mayr confirmed his remark on Wetmore, but regarding
that on Barbour he commented (pers. comm.):
“I am quite certain now that I never made this claimed remark about T. Barbour.
He was a herpetologist, and I could not have judged him at all. I suspect that
J. Greenway (who sometimes intrigued) had invented this story and I am sorry
that Barbour was taken in by him. I was quite friendly with J. L. Peters already in
1931 and helped him with every later volume of the Check-list of Birds of the World.
Perhaps this made Greenway jealous? My opinion on T. Barbour at that time was
completely different from what I supposedly said.”
The Society for the Study of Evolution at first had just 300 members. Mayr
as its secretary ordered 1500 copies of the first issues of the journal “Evolution”,
seemingly a vast excess. In due time, however, it turned out that the excess stock
gave the society a most welcome additional income when more and more libraries
subscribed to the journal and wanted to buy the back volumes. Eventually the
whole stock sold out justifying his optimism. A similar example is mentioned on
p. 111.
Many times in his life, Mayr felt as the odd man in his environment which,
as he mentioned, may well be the reason why he tended to assert himself rather
vigorously in his scientific controversies. When he came to Dresden in 1917, he
diverged by his Bavarian accent. Later in New York he was the only German
at the AMNH and much younger than his colleagues in the Bird Department.
Stresemann was well aware of Mayr’s peculiarity. He commented on the Principles
of Systematic Zoology: “I like very much your tolerance, shown in many places,
of views and principles with which you basically disagree. Meanwhile you have
checked considerably your inborn aggressive drive” (15 April 1969). As a versatile
and convincing fighter for his views, Mayr rebelled against the older generation
in the AOU during the 1930s, against the discrimination of systematic biology
versus molecular biology, and against those philosophers of science who only
knew a philosophy of physics and no philosophy of biology.
“He fights for ideas and the advancement of knowledge. ‘Fights’ is the proper
verb here because he is relentless in trying to discover what is confirmable and
to discard what is not” (Moore 1994: 10). “Mayr was—and still is—an outgoing
man who is very much at home at professional meetings and conferences, where
he vigorously and tirelessly defends his views. He makes no distinctions between
august experts and hesitant graduate students. He is as willing to spend time
setting one straight as the other. The vigor and definiteness with which Mayr