Background

Edward Charles Jeffrey was born on May 21, 1866, in Saint Catharines, Ontario, Canada. He was one of five children of Andrew Jeffrey and Cecilia Mary Walkingshaw.

Education

Jeffrey earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Toronto in 1888, and a gold medal with honors in modern languages and English. Having audited courses in biology and finding high school teaching of languages not to his liking, he returned to the university for graduate study in biology, where such study was essentially zoological.

He completed his Ph.D. in botany at Harvard in 1899.

Career

Jeffrey obtained a three-year appointment as a fellow in biology from 1889 to 1892. Because of his interest in plants, stemming from the floristic environs of Toronto and of eastern Quebec where his family spent summers, he directed his fellowship time to wide reading in botanical literature. He later stated to his classes that no single work had had so profound an influence on him as did Darwin’s Origin of Species.

In 1892 Jeffrey received a permanent appointment as lecturer at Toronto, with the suggestion that he build a program in botany comparable to that in zoology. During his ten years in this lectureship, he decided on his future program of study - the evolutionary history and sequence of vascular plants in geological time and their interrelationships. His Darwin-motivated intent included not only the assembling of available knowledge but also the exploitation of comparative morphology and anatomy for new evolutionary evidence. He devised technical methods which enabled him to make thin microscopic sections of refractory plant materials such as wood and fossilized remains.

In addition to beginning work, on his own initiative, on a Ph.D. thesis problem, he developed some of his most important work while at Toronto. The series of original papers published between 1899 and 1905 established Jeffrey’s reputation. An example of his quickly acquired maturity in comparative or evolutionary morphology is his reclassification of vascular plants as a whole in 1899 into the Lycopsida and the Pteropsida; this change from the classical system won worldwide acceptance and, with little alteration, has withstood the test of increased knowledge of fossil as well as of living plants.

In 1902 he accepted an assistant professorship in vegetable histology at Harvard. From 1907 until his retirement in 1933 he was a professor of plant morphology, and as an emeritus professor, he continued daily use of his laboratory until shortly before his death in 1952.

In the early years of the twentieth century, indomitable will and firm convictions were needed to face the controversies brought on by the rediscovery of Mendelism and the interpretation of genetic change in the causal interpretation of evolution. Jeffrey’s Scottish background enabled him to maintain the same direction and intensity of effort throughout his life.

Two facets of Jeffrey’s program deserve special comment: his cytological studies, unfinished at his death, and his studies on coal, published in final form in 1925. The former have been questioned for their putative evolutionary mechanisms and their lack of genetic checks. But in regard to the latter studies, although geologists have added to his concept of a single origin of coal, they have supported his demonstration of its vegetable origin.

Achievements

• Edward Charles Jeffrey went down in history as a prominent botanist and university professor. He is best known for his the morphology and phylogeny of vascular plants: he reclassified all vascular plants into Lycopsida and Pteropsida; while later classifications have refined plant groupings, these two divisions remain as two of the four classes of vascular plants. His Anatomy of Woody Plants, an anatomical evolutionary overview, was an important work in its field. He is also remembered for demonstrating that coal has a vegetable origin.

Works

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  • The Structure And Development Of The Stem In The Pteridophyta And Gymnosperms 1902
  • The Anatomy of Woody Plants 1917
  • Coal And Civilization 1925
  • The morphology of the central cylinder in the angiosperms 1899
  • The gametophyte of Botrychium virginianum 1898
  • The Comparative Anatomy and Phylogeny of the Coniferales: The Genus Sequoia, Part 1 1903
  • The Comparative Anatomy And Phylogeny Of The Coniferales: The Abietineae, Part 2 1905
  • A New Araucarian Genus From the Triassic 1910

Views

Jeffrey had absolute faith in the doctrine of evolution and was greatly inspired by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Personality

Jeffrey was a skillful writer.

Physical Characteristics: Jeffrey had vigorous health.

Connections

In 1901 he married Jennette Atwater Street of Toronto. They had a son, Charles Street Jeffrey.

Father:

Andrew Jeffrey

Mother:

Cecilia Mary Walkingshaw

Spouse:

Jennette Atwater Street

Son:

Charles Street Jeffrey

Brother:

John Strachan Jeffrey

Sister:

Cecilia Elizabeth Jeffrey

Sister:

Mary Jeffrey

Brother:

James Norris Jeffrey

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 7
  1973