3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

TheInfluenceofTeachers 37
excellent dissertation and passed his examinations several weeks ago. The test went
excellently and, by general agreement, he received the rarely given mark summa
cum laude. I am most interested to keep this very promising young man who is
leaning toward museum work at the Berlin museum” (see also Landsberg 1995:
124).
Several knowledgeable zoologists now advised Mayr to switch to Entwicklungsmechanik
(experimental research in embryology), if he were to choose academic
zoology as his career: “Spemann [1869–1941] fills all the vacant chairs,”
they told him. His field had established a virtual monopoly. However, Mayr’s goal
remained to work at the Berlin museum and to prepare himself for an expedition
to the tropics.
The Influence of Teachers
Ernst Mayr remembered fondly his grammar school teacher in Würzburg and
several others at high school in Munich and Dresden. Mr. Löwe, their natural
history teacher, was beloved by every pupil in the class. He told them they could be
as lazy as they wanted to while in the gymnasium, as long as they passed on to the
next higher grade but afterwards, at the university, they had to work like hell. Mayr
followed this advice with great success. Their superb teachers of Greek and Latin
had actually traveled in Greece and Italy and collected personal experience with
nearly everything described in the classical literature. In natural history they used
the text book by Kraepelin in which ecology, adaptation and behavior featured
prominently. What these and other teachers achieved quite splendidly was to give
a broad general education as a basis for university studies. Late in his life, Ernst
Mayr looked back at his high school education evaluating it as follows:
“I received a classical education at a German gymnasium where I had 9 years
of Latin, German, and mathematics, 7 years of Greek and history, 4 years of
French, and no English whatsoever; also a great deal of geography, together with
1-year classes of various science subjects. Now, 75 years later, how do I evaluate
such a strongly classics-based education? I still think it was very valuable, but
I must admit that it crowded out some subjects that would have been even more
important. Although I had lots of history, it was mostly dynastic history, and I had
no courses in the social sciences, about democracy and citizenship or some other
subjects valuable for daily life. But ignorance is met wherever we look, not only in
Germany. What struck me most when I came to the United States in 1931 was the
incredible ignorance of most Americans, including college graduates, about the
rest of the world” (1997i: 287).
At the University of Greifswald, Ernst Mayr noted, “physics was rather oldfashioned.
Chemistry was an excellent course taught by Pummerer, a specialist
in polymer chemistry, soon called to one of the big universities. Physiology was
taught competently but somewhat old-fashioned although I bought the latest book
in biochemistry in order to broaden my horizon. The teaching in anatomy was
first-rate. There were three professors who taught different aspects including histology
and embryology and supervised the dissections. There was no shortage of