Biographical Memoirs Volume 45 (1974) / Chapter Skim
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Irving Widmer Bailey
Irving Widmer Bailey
Pages 22-59
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From page 23... ...
This intentness of purpose along with a natural ingenuity and mechanical ability permitted him in those depression years between the two world wars to master his field. He became nationally and internationally recognized as expert in all aspects of morphological botany, ranging from cytology to anatomy, from evolutionary trends to phylogeny and taxonomy, from organic chemistry to wood structure and wood technology, and from silviculture to preservation of forests.
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From page 24... ...
Enrolled as a degree candidate in 1887, Solon Bailey agreed to spend about forty hours weekly as an assistant. Within a few weeks, Pickering found Bailey's work so satisfactory that he began paying him a small salary and recommended that he be given course credit toward his degree, which he obtained in 1888.
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From page 25... ...
It is stated that the accompanying baggage and material for building a planned, prefabricated observatory and living quarters for the family and staff comprised one hundred units, all of which had to be landed at Calleo and eventually transported over an eight-mile mountainous trail. At times, the trail had to be specially constructed to permit movement of equipment to a then-unnamed peak—later named Mount Harvard—above Chosica, some 16,500 feet above sea level.
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From page 26... ...
They were out of contact with the world for more than two weeks. This account of the early life of Irving Bailey during the two expeditions to Peru has been reported in order that the reader may visualize its enduring effect on him.
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From page 27... ...
degree in 1907, magna cum laude, having also earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa. In his fifty-year Harvard class report he also stated, "In college, I browsed around in history, chemistry, geology and meteorology, but it was not until my senior year that speeches of Gifford Pinchot and President Eliot induced me to undertake a career in forestry, particularly owing to the appeal of an out-of-door profession." So he registered in the Division of Forestry of the newly designated Graduate School of Applied Sciences and received his M.F.
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From page 28... ...
Though Bailey was appointed associate professor of forestry in 1920, his commitments were entirely to research in the interpretive aspects of plant anatomy rather than to silvicultural practices or to economic aspects of forestry. During the eight years of his assistant professorship, however, the direct lines of the research Bailey was formulating for himself were retarded.
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From page 29... ...
The second circumstance affecting Bailey's research plans arose with the United States' becoming involved in World War I In 1918 the Federal Aircraft Production Bureau requested and obtained Irving Bailey's services in a tour of duty at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio.
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From page 30... ...
One can note in his bibliography a paper in a posthumous publication of Wheeler's in 1942—five years after his death—on British Guiana ant-plants with a section contributed by Bailey. The period of the 1 920s was very significant in Irving Bailey's career.
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From page 31... ...
Tupper, of the range of size variations in vascular elements found in different groups of vascular plants, especially gymnosperms and angiosperms. Considering that all cells of the plant are derived from the isodiametric cells of the apical meristem, the queries, of course, were raised by Bailey, "How do the seemingly organized cell differences arise to produce the heterogeneity within a tree?
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From page 32... ...
The carefully considered findings should have had a profound influence on the establishment of a national policy aimed at maintaining a balance of reforestation with cutting and the utilization of our forest resources. The recommendations of the percentages of publicly owned forests versus those in private holdings that should be maintained on a sustained yield basis were considered sound, as were the recommended protective measures against forest fires.
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From page 33... ...
Apart from his accepted external commitments, Bailey worked assiduously with one group of graduate students and research fellows, using newly devised techniques and methods to study the vascular cambium of conifers and angiosperms. With a second group he attempted to discover whether variations in vascular patterns and in diversification of the vascular elements within these patterns had evolutionary significance.
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From page 34... ...
Cell division of cambial cells, many times as long as wide, measuring several thousand microns in length in certain species of conifers, is an amazing cytological phenomenon. The two ends of the dividing cell may still be undivided apparently for hours or days after the two daughter nuclei in the middle of the cell are in interphase stage in seemingly separate cells.
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From page 35... ...
In the early l 930s, capital funds available to the Bussey Institution for Research in Applied Biology had become so reduced that the university had included space for the Bussey staff and students in its plans for the new Biological Laboratories. Bailey moved from the Bussey Institution in Forest Hills to Cambridge in the summer of 1936.
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From page 36... ...
To this task, Irving Bailey gave two full years; in it, he had the complete and enthusiastic cooperation of his colleagues as well as the support of administrative officials of the university. In 1945, he finally submitted the results of the study with a proposed plan in a confidential report, Botany and Its Applications at Harvard, more commonly known as the "Bailey report." This report commanded the respect of all concerned.
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From page 37... ...
The citation accompanying the award was "Your University salutes you for your direction of botanical study and for your accomplishments in searching in the anatomy of plants, for clues to the miracle of growth." That the degree singled out his international scientific attainment— more than any administrative success he may have achieved— meant much to Irving Bailey, how much only his close friends and his family knew. In 1946, having modestly and quietly enjoyed the success of his administrative venture, Bailey turned back to his research, perforce neglected for some years.
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From page 38... ...
Bailey decided that it was timely to examine the old and continuously baffling issue of the origin of angiosperms. Would an investigation of all available knowledge of both anatomical and floral organizational patterns of all suspected primitive living angiosperms provide adequate information to suggest the probable nature of the primitive angiospermous plant and its flower?
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From page 39... ...
Pollen grains, upon being transferred by insect or wind to the glandular apex or margins of the open, conduplicately folded carpers, reached the ovules by developing pollen tubes and growing down along the glandular margins or inner surfaces of the folded carpers, or in many species, along the conduplicate or tubular upper part of the carper. The stamens also in some species were somewhat foliar, bearing the pollen sacs or anthers embedded in the "foliar tissues," also close to branch veins.
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From page 40... ...
If plants of the "Ranalean complex" were not the most primitive of living angiosperms, Bailey indicated, they represented at least one main evolutionary line of origin and elaboration, providing the angiosperms should prove to be polyphyletic. All of these exploratory studies were in hand in 1955 when Bailey reached seventy, the mandatory retirement age.
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From page 41... ...
In addition to his much appreciated and well deserved honorary degree from his alma mater in 1955, Irving Bailey received honorary doctorates in science from the University of Wisconsin in 1931 and from the University of Syracuse in
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From page 42... ...
In 1956, Professor Bailey was one of fifty outstanding botanists of the United States to be recognized on the occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Botanical Society of America, his certificate of merit stating, "plant anatomist and inspiring teacher, for his outstanding contributions on the structure of the cell wall and the histology of the cambium, for his application of anatomy and morphology to problems of evolution of angiosperms." It was Irving Bailey and his colleagues, with their cool, deliberate,
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From page 43... ...
On June 1b, 1911, while a young instructor in the School of Forestry, Irving Bailey married Helen Diman Harwood, daughter of a prominent family of Littleton, Massachusetts. Two sons were born to them, Harwood and Solon Irving.
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From page 44... ...
The river was lined with bushes, among them being many beach plums. The fruits of these Irving gathered in the late summer; his friends could always count on jars of beach plum jelly made by Irving himself.
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From page 45... ...
The younger son, Solon, who cherished the place, died very suddenly at age fifty, a short time after his father's death, also of a coronary occlusion. Irving Bailey is fully remembered.
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From page 46... ...
To his wife, Olive Hawkins Wetmore, to whose knowledge of the Bailey family and whose cooperative aid the author owes much in the preparation of this article on our close friend of many years.
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From page 47... ...
Journal of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University i. Forestry Journal of Forestry I
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From page 48... ...
II. The structure of the pit membranes in the tracheids of conifers and their relation to the penetration of gases, liquids and finely divided solids into green and seasoned wood.
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From page 49... ...
Wood Section, Materials Engineering Department, Bureau of Aircraft Production, Dayton, Ohio. 1919 Depressed segments of oak stems.
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From page 50... ...
The feeding habits of Pseudomyrmine and other ants. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (II)
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From page 51... ...
I Arnold Arbor., 14:259-73.
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From page 52... ...
X Structure, optical properties and chemical composition of the socalled middle lamella.
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From page 53... ...
(A section including photomicrographs contained in an article by W
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From page 54... ...
Amborella trichopoda Baill. A new morphological type of vesselless dicotyledon.
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From page 55... ...
I Arnold Arbor., 30: 187-210.
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From page 56... ...
Additional notes on the vesselless dicotyledon, Amborella trichopoda Baill.
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From page 57... ...
Arbor., 44:222-31. Comparative anatomy of the leaf-bearing Cactaceae.
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From page 58... ...
Arnold Arbor., 46:445-52. Comparative anatomy of the leaf-bearing Cactaceae.
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