Part One, by David Rose - Mushroom, the Journal of Wild ...

William Alphonso Murrill: The Legend of the Naturalist
by David W. Rose
He had a reputation as a suave
and charming southern gentleman, a
parlor-room pianist and entertainer
of European royalty. He could
“put a name on” practically every
mushroom he encountered in the
field and traveled three continents in
search of new species, conducting
exhaustive studies of herbarium
collections. He expanded our
knowledge of agarics, boletes and
polypores, yet was reviled by certain
taxonomists as an unregenerate
“splitter” who slavishly followed
the American Code of nomenclature
promulgated by Nathaniel Lord
Britton of the New York Botanical
Garden. He styled himself “the
Naturalist” and wrote children’s
books, associating with famous
literary figures of his age such as
John Burroughs and Rabindranath
Tagore. William Alphonso Murrill
stands at the beginning of twentieth
century mycology as a seminal
figure, and the complete story of his
life has yet to be fully told. It is a
story of a rise, fall, and remarkable
rebirth, a grand tale with both comic
and tragic aspects.
Murrill was born on October
13, 1869 near Lynchburg, Virginia
where his parents operated a school
for girls. He looked back on his
happy childhood in his book Billy
the Boy Naturalist (1918). His
youthful scholarly bent led to studies
in science, agriculture, mechanics,
literature, and languages, earning
two bachelor’s and a master’s degree
in the process of choosing a career
as a teacher. In autobiographical
writings of later years, he revealed
that he began seriously to think
of himself as a naturalist while
teaching at the Wesleyan Female
Seminary in Staunton, Virginia in
the 1890s. He then entered Cornell
University to study under George
Atkinson, first collecting parasitic
fungi for the Cornell herbarium
and then embarking on the study
of polypores in 1898. Murrill
had a penchant for romanticizing
the early phase of his career as a
teacher, and perhaps he was happier
then, for soon after his marriage
to Edna Lee Lutrell in 1897 a son
born to them died in infancy. This
tragedy undoubtedly wreaked a
great emotional toll on the new
parents. Murrill gained his doctoral
degree in 1900, traveled to Paris to
attend the International Botanical
Congress, and then relocated to
New York City.
William Alphonso Murrill, in his days
as assistant director of the New York
Botanical Gardens
The New York Botanical
Garden, under the directorship of
Nathaniel Lord Britton, was fast
becoming a center of leadership
in botanical science at century’s
turn. Murrill, however, did not step
into the ranks of NYBG botanists
at first; he continued his teaching
career as a biology teacher at the
nearby DeWitt Clinton High School
in the Bronx. Through the Torrey
Botanical Club he met Lucien
Marcus Underwood and began
publication of a series of articles
“Polyporaceae of North America”
in the Torrey club’s bulletin. When
Franklin Sumner Earle resigned
his position as staff mycologist at
the Garden in 1904, Dr. Britton, a
Torrey club stalwart, hired Murrill
to replace him as Assistant Curator.
This was a defining moment in his
life – the moment the “naturalist”
embarked on his career as a fullfledged
professional “mycologist.”
Murrill’s experience at the
Garden was multi-faceted. He
immediately began to build the
mycological collections and
continued comparative studies
of basidiomycetes, especially
agarics and polypores. Britton soon
promoted him to Acting Director,
then Assistant Director, effectively
placing him second in command
of the whole Garden. These
appointments were a measure of the
Director’s confidence in Murrill,
and they carried a certain distinction
but were fraught with the anxiety
of serving closely the punctilious
Dr. Britton and his overbearing
wife, the bryologist Elizabeth
Gertrude Britton. Murrill eventually
ran afoul of them both. For the
moment, however, his stature as a
mycologist soared. When chestnut
trees in the nearby Bronx Zoo
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egan dying en masse from an
unknown canker in 1904, Murrill
identified the fungal culprit as the
pyrenomycete Diaporthe parasitica
(now Cryphonectria parasitica). He
went on to advise state governments
(particularly Pennsylvania) and
forest preserves such as the Biltmore
Estate of George W. Vanderbilt
about the protection of stands of
American chestnut trees from the
destructive fungus. By 1950 over 9
million acres of chestnut trees were
decimated by the fungal pathogen
that Murrill first identified at the
century’s turn.
In a sense, William Murrill’s
most visible legacy is Mycologia,
the premier journal of mycological
science in North America. In 1908
the New York Botanical Garden’s
Board of Scientific Directors
authorized not only a feasibility
study for the journal but authorized
experiments to reproduce
therein full-color illustrations
of mushrooms. Murrill and the
Garden issued the first number of
Mycologia in January 1909, and
it featured color reproductions of
fungi, leading the way to what has
become a standard of macroscopic
identification of mushrooms in
published guidebooks to this day.
He continued as editor of the
journal until his resignation from
the Garden in 1924.
William Murrill was an
inveterate traveler and hunter of
mushrooms. He collected fungi
throughout the northeastern United
States from Maine to Florida and
also found time for trips to the
Caribbean, Mexico, and Europe as
well as the Pacific coast where he
lunched with Luther Burbank. His
wife accompanied him on some
excursions to paint illustrations
of the fungi he collected. He was
always fond of hunting mushrooms
in his native Virginia. His travels
to Europe usually involved
examinations of herbarium
collections; one such trip in 1906
took him to herbaria at Trento
(Italy), Paris, Berlin, Stockholm,
Copenhagen, Uppsala, Leiden, and
the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew,
England. Murrill established an
enduring relationship with Europe’s
foremost amateur mycologist,
Giacomo Bresadola. In a personal
journal entry dated August 8, 1913
he jotted the following notes about
his visit to “the Curate”, as he called
the Abbe Bresadola:
“Went to Villa Salvadori met
by Baron, a small ordinary kindly
man who had servant take me to
Curate’s house down at village
below. Found … curate & Baron[‘s]
pretty little daughters in garden
getting fl[ower]s. He greeted me
cordially, introduced me & took
me into reception room & drank
each other’s health & talked in
German. Free & easy. Strong &
stout but not fat. Self-confident in
his vast knowledge of fungi & has a
large collection at Trient. Saccardo
has few poly[pore]s. Bres[adola]
did not give him the rare ones. We
journeyed back to his dejeuner at
11 picking fungi & talking. The
little girls meanwhile bringing their
baskets with spec[imen]s for him to
see.” 1
Murrill admired Bresadola’s
work (and appointed him an
associate editor of Mycologia)
but observed that he lacked
attentiveness to North American
species. In the same personal journal
Murrill commented, “It is certainly
true that many forms here are same
as ours. Probably the forms among
conifers in [North America] are
more like these. But our forms are
not sufficiently appreciated in their
differences... Bres[adola] makes
a good deal of spores (not form)
& when same he throws rest in. It
is easy to understand how in dried
spec[imen]s … species might in this
way be confused. Be careful then
about allied species when reading
after him. His self-confidence,
too, is in the way of investigation.
He knows all the Europ[ean]
poly[pore]s. In many varieties he
says. Believe Bres[adola] regarding
lit[erature] &c, &c but beware of
lumping species & geographical
groups.” Murrill elsewhere noted
caustically of European collectors,
“To the Swede or the German,
Kew is a very foreign country and
America is off the map!” 2
The year 1915 was a watershed
year for Murrill. On the heels of
his publication of the monographs
Northern Polypores and American
Boletes and the acquisition of
Lucien Marcus Underwood’s fungus
collection for the Garden in 1914,
Murrill issued Southern Polypores,
Western Polypores, and Tropical
Polypores, all self-published in
1915. Though he continued to
make regular contributions on the
taxonomy of hymenomycetes to
North American Flora, Mycologia,
and other Garden publications, it
is perhaps a measure of Britton’s
waning support for his work that
“the Naturalist” was faced with
publishing five books on poroid
fungi in rapid succession at his own
expense. Yet Murrill saw himself
as a committed educator with a
public audience and followed
these treatises with Edible and
Poisonous Mushrooms in 1916,
accompanied by an enormous wall
chart with color illustrations of
common mushrooms taken from
his Mycologia reproductions. His
interest in writing popular books
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egan to tip the scale over technical
publications as he went on to
publish Three Young Crusoes (1918)
dedicated to journalist Dorothy Dix,
Billy the Boy Naturalist (1918),
The Natural History of Staunton,
Virginia (1919), and The Naturalist
in a Boarding School (1919).
Though these latter works
have inspired the work of some
literary naturalists of recent times
(Annie Dillard cites William
Murrill as a source of inspiration
in her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), the
writing does not hold up very well
today. Much of it seems forced,
trivial, and even immature. There
was something else at work here. In
a certain way Murrill saw himself
as a poet or artist, but he was a poet
trying unsuccessfully to escape the
skin of a naturalist and mycologist.
He peppered his popular writings
with quotations from Wordsworth,
Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Emerson,
and Ruskin, but in the meantime,
back at his day job, he fought a
losing battle over technical points
of nomenclature and taxonomy with
his strait-laced boss at the Garden,
Dr. Britton.
The American Code of
Botanical Nomenclature rigidly
insisted on priority of names,
and Murrill grew entangled in
arguments with Britton about the
names of fungi. There are scores
of examples, but the most striking
and anachronistic to amateur
mycologists today may be his use
of “Venenarius” as a replacement
for the genus Amanita. This usage
was flatly rejected (or at least
ignored) by the bulk of American
mycologists, some of whom
believed Britton’s American Code
no better than a cranky, self-serving
ploy to obfuscate taxonomic
logic and upset nomenclatural
reasonableness. On the other hand,
Murrill well understood some of the
advantages in Britton’s theoretical
position (e.g. single starting
point) and, moreover, realized
himself the need for smaller, more
natural genera in the taxonomy of
basidiomycetes; yet he gained the
unfortunate reputation of being a
“splitter”. He must have recognized
the frustrations he provoked in
certain traditionalists, for in 1918
he published a comparative guide
to polypore genera, Murrill’s and
Saccardo’s Names of Polypores
Compared. When the tally was
complete, Saccardo had recognized
20 genera of polypores whereas
Murrill had more than tripled this
with a grand total of 71! Despite
his reputation as a splitter, many
of Murrill’s new genera have held
up and some have proven very
useful to succeeding generations of
mycologists.
The Garden had authorized
Murrill’s first three European
journeys in 1906, 1910, and 1913,
but it was the fourth, in 1918,
that ultimately led to a falling
out with Nathaniel Britton and a
tragic rupture in his career. On this
particular voyage Murrill failed to
return to New York as planned, and
after an alarming amount of time
with no word from him, he was
considered missing. The Garden
contacted European museums,
herbaria, and his known associates,
but no one knew his whereabouts.
He finally returned to the Bronx
months later with the report that
he had been hospitalized for a
kidney condition in a small French
town and was actually near death
with no means of outside contact
for many weeks. He suffered from
a polycystic kidney problem for
the balance of his life. 3 The Board
of Scientific Directors noted his
hospitalization in June 1918 and
return to work in December and
in January 1919 also noted his
“appointment” to the position of
“Supervisor of Public Instruction.”
This appointment, at a considerable
reduction in salary, was in reality a
serious demotion and crushing blow
to his self-esteem.
Whether or not the unexplained
absence was actually the proximate
cause of the demotion, Murrill’s
career now took a downward
trajectory. In 1920 he made a
request to the Director-in-Chief
for an extended, but partial, leave
of absence of one day per week.
Britton flatly denied Murrill’s
request. In our more liberal age
of the Americans with Disabilities
Act we may tend to interpret such
treatment as a species of cruelty,
but the requested alteration in
the customary work schedule
was a total aberration in Britton’s
worldview. Murrill plugged away
at his new position, which largely
entailed a grueling round of lectures
and exhibits, both at the Garden
and on the road. He administered
a five-week exhibition on plants
used in architectural design at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York, lectured on the history
and botany of the lotus at the
Chicago Art Institute, and talked
endlessly about the fungi to garden
clubs and Girl Scout troops.
Mycology remained his
constant passion. Professionally,
he represented the Garden at a
meeting of plant pathologists
and Connecticut farm bureau
agents in 1919 and attended
a conference of the American
Phytopathological Society on home
territory in Staunton, Virginia in
1920. He found great pleasure
and camaraderie in an amateur
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mycological club he established
that same year – the Yama Farms
Mycological Club. Yama Farms
was a Catskill resort about 20
miles west of Poughkeepsie, New
York, a watering hole for the rich
and famous. Here Murrill met John
Burroughs, the Nobel Prize-winning
Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore,
and members of the Dupont family
whom he encouraged in mushroom
collecting and identification. With
great affection he installed John
Burroughs as “Honorary President”
of the club. Murrill dedicated his
remaining energies in the activities
of the Yama Farms club for the next
three years
Amanita murrillana, named after W. A.
Murrill
Henry Gleason, the plant
ecologist who succeeded Murrill
as Assistant Director at the Garden,
tells a revealing story about his
touchy relations with the Brittons.
Gleason reported that from 1919
to 1923 “nothing that Murrill did
could satisfy Britton.” Mrs. Britton
one day stormed off to her husband
with an item taken from the Bronx
Home News, a local paper, which
quoted Murrill saying that “the
shimmy dance was originated by
goldfish, because he had noticed
that his goldfish were doing the
shimmy all day long.” This sent
the Victorian sensibilities of Mrs.
Britton into paroxysm, and Dr.
Britton would have fired Murrill
on the spot but lacked the authority
for summary dismissal. 4 Murrill
survived this trivial incident, but
continued on a downward spiral of
nervous prostration and depression.
Marital and financial problems
compounded his decline. His wife
moved away, never to return;
their marriage ended in divorce.
Exasperated with the Garden and
with life, he quietly removed to
Virginia. He bore eloquent but
circumspect witness to his midlife
crisis in his Autobiography
(1945) when he wrote: “In August,
1924, the Naturalist tendered his
resignation and left the Garden
after laboring there for twenty
years. The gilded net had finally so
enmeshed him that little time was
left for research and the long grind
had worn him down.” 5 Dejected,
depressed, and physically exhausted
Murrill moved back to Virginia,
and with Henry David Thoreau
in mind, he built himself a cabin
in the woods to seek rejuvenation
through the natural world. He was
hospitalized intermittently and was
reportedly seen working as a day
laborer. It seemed his mycological
career was finished. Curtis Gates
Lloyd, the acerbic author of
Mycological Notes, commented
with an ironic gibe at Nathaniel
Britton, “There is universal regret
among mycologists…that Dr.
Murrill has severed his connections
with New York. Everyone likes
Dr. Murrill, he is such a polished,
affable gentleman and he would
be an ideal head to such an
institution.” 6 Murrill gravitated
toward Florida and decided to move
further south. The Naturalist, once
a world-renown mycologist, now
preferred to drop out completely
and settle in a Florida backwater.
He may never have re-entered the
world of mycology were it not for a
chance meeting on a highway south
of Gainesville. Dr. George Weber of
the University of Florida, sometime
in 1926, happened to recognize an
unshaven, dirty, and disoriented man
playing classical music on a piano
in a crowded pavilion of the Tin
Can Tourist Camp of Gainesville,
Florida. The man at the piano was
William Alphonso Murrill. 7
This is part 1 of a 2-part
article on the life of William A.
Murrill. Part 2 will appear in
the next issue of Mushroom: The
Journal of Wild Mushrooming.
David W. Rose, 3 December 2002
Endnotes:
1
William Alphonso Murrill
Records, 1903-1957, LuEsther T.
Mertz Library, New York Botanical
Garden
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2
ibid
3
Information of James W.
Kimbrough to author, 26 January
2000
4
Henry Gleason A. Short and
Simple Annals, unpublished mss.,
p. 288
5
Murrill, William A.
Autobiography (1945) p. 137
6
Lloyd, Curtis Gates
Mycological Notes (1924) 7:1342
7
Information of James W.
Kimbrough, 26 January 2000