Preface for Centennial Edition ofThe American Midland Naturalist

Abstract

It is fitting that, in this year when our campus is focused through the Notre Dame Forum on issues of sustainability and responsible stewardship of the earth’s resources, we celebrate the centennial of the University’s oldest scholarly journal, The American Midland Naturalist. For 100 y, since it was started in 1909 by the Rev. Julius Nieuwland C.S.C., this journal has been a unique Notre Dame contribution to scientific understanding of the earth, its creatures and its natural systems. As president and provost of the University, we are pleased to pay tribute to The American Midland Naturalist, to Dr. William E. Evans, the current editor, and to all who over the years have had a hand in creating it, sustaining it and maintaining its reputation. When Father Nieuwland created The American Midland Naturalist, he did so with the intent of providing an outlet for studies about the natural history of the American Midwest. But both the subject matter and the geographic reach of the journal’s articles soon grew beyond the bounds suggested by the title. Before it was even 15 y old, the journal was publishing material about subjects far from the Midwest, and the broad field of ‘‘natural history’’ was giving way to specialized fields of study and investigation. Most notable among those was the budding field of ecology. Already in those early days there was a recognition that activities in one sector of the environment were fundamentally inseparable from those in others. To page chronologically through the 160 volumes of The American Midland Naturalist is to observe the growth and development of biological science over the last 100 y. From an abundance of articles in the early years describing and classifying plants, animals, other organisms and fossils in their natural states and habitats, the journal’s contents have, like science itself, grown more numeric in their approach and more experimental. Occasionally the experimentation has been of unusual and daring nature. A former editor, Robert P. McIntosh, in a history of the journal’s first 80 y, observed that the ‘‘devotion of natural historians to their cause was evident in [a 1971 article] when a panel of human tasters was assembled to determine the relative palatibility (sic) to predators of tadpoles from Costa Rica.’’ Both in its early years and more recently, The American Midland Naturalist has published some of the most eminent biological scientists of their times. Besides Nieuwland, who achieved his greatest fame in chemistry, but had a lifelong passion for botany, the early eminences who graced the journal’s pages included E.L. Greene, the legendary plant taxonomist and historian of botany with whom Nieuwland had studied at Catholic University of America and later was a colleague at Notre Dame, and Lucy Braun, a plant ecologist who was to become the first woman president of the Ecological Society of America. The farsightedness of The American Midland Naturalist and its then editor Theodore Just was demonstrated in Volume 21, No. 1, published in 1939. Virtually the entire number was given over to contributions from a landmark conference, ‘‘Plant and Animal Communities,’’ held in August and September 1938 at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. Described later as an ‘‘ecological audit,’’ the conference was, in McIntosh’s words, ‘‘an attempt to bridge the gaps between American and European ecologists, plant and animal ecologists and aquatic and terrestrial ecologists.’’ Ultimately, he said, the conference ‘‘failed Am. Midl. Nat. 161:5–6