Edgar T. Wherry and His Contributions to Pteridology

Abstract

When he first became interested in ferns, Dr. Wherry was thirty years old. His background had been in chemistry and geology, and at the time he was an assistant curator in mineralogy at the U.S. National Museum. Some amateur botanists took him to see a patch of the walking fern, Camptosorus rhizophyllus, where it was growing on gneiss, and he became curious about its soil requirements. This led to his first publication on ferns A Chemical Study of the Habitat of the Walking in 1916. After that Wherry became an expert on hydrogen-ion concentrations in the soils of eastern United States ferns, and he also broadened out into questions of their geography, ecology, and systematics. By the end of his career he had become an authority on North pteridophytes north of Mexico. In 1917, Wherry transferred to the Department of Agriculture, where he came under the influence of F. V. Coville, the Chief Botanist, who encouraged him in the study of plants. By 1930, Wherry was prominent enough in his new profession to be invited to join the Botany Department of the University of Pennsylvania. He accepted this opportunity, which was ideal for him because it represented a return to his alma mater and to his home city of Philadelphia. Wherry taught at the University until his retirement in 1955. He stayed active for many years longer than most botanists; he continued to take field trips well into his 80's and was still writing letters as late as his 90's. Only in the last few years before his death at 97 on 19 May 1982 did he lose touch. Wherry was very active in the Fern Society, and three-fourths of his pteridophyte publications were in the American Fern He was President of the Society from 1934 to 1939, and he also took charge of preparing a cumulative 25-year index to the Journal. When Maurice Broun wrote his Index to the and Fern Allies of North America (1938), Wherry supplied the habitat and range data for most of the species. After becoming discouraged by the poor quality of the manuals then available for identifying pteridophytes, he published one himself entitled Guide to Eastern Ferns (1937), which, together with the second edition, sold more than 6000 copies and did much to stimulate the popularity of ferns among naturalists and botanists. Later he wrote another valuable guide, this one for the southeastern United States. The royalties from his field manuals were donated to the Fern Society. Wherry did not become a major botanist of his time; he was not involved in any of the big ideas such as biosystematics, cytotaxonomy, and phylogeny that burgeoned during his lifetime. His approach to the study of plants was deficient in such