Background
Frank Shipley Collins was born on February 06, 1848 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was of an old New England family, the son of Joshua Cobb and Elizabeth (Carter) Collins.
Frank Shipley Collins was born on February 06, 1848 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was of an old New England family, the son of Joshua Cobb and Elizabeth (Carter) Collins.
Collins was largely educated at home, his health being very delicate, by two aunts who added to their knowledge of literature and languages a distinct interest in botany. The boy attended high school, graduating in 1863, and tried several small mercantile positions, but from 1864 he was practically an invalid because of violent asthma, and occupied himself in studying harmony and musical classics.
Collins entered the Malden Rubber Shoe Company as a bookkeeper, and rapidly rose to the position of manager, a post which he held till 1913, when he retired, only to be recalled to it in the wartime pressure of 1918 as an efficiency expert.
About 1876, on a visit to Magnolia, Massachusetts, his attention was attracted by some “sea mosses” or marine algae, which were being sold on postal cards as souvenirs of the seaside resort, and which bore scientific names so palpably wrong that Collins amused himself by trying to set them right. This led rapidly to an intensive study of the algae, a subject which had engaged no prominent specialists in America for more than a generation.
His first note-books record the species found in the tidal pools no farther away than Lynn Beach. In the next forty-five years his interests broadened and intensified, so that he became the authority upon the algae of the New England coast. His personal knowledge of the flora of the Bermudas and his studies upon the collections of other workers from all the North American coasts brought him greater fame in his avocation than he ever achieved in his business life. He began to lecture and write on the algae in 1879. His series of New England algo- logical studies appeared in Rhodora from 1899 to 1911. The Green Algae of North America, with its subsequent supplements, first issued in 1909 by Tufts College, was a notable work which opened the most neglected branch of algology, while his Working Key to the Genera of North American Algae, published by Tufts College in 1918, went far toward popularizing the whole subject.
He never possessed college training himself, but his instinct for languages and his natural scientific ability made him as valued a member of the marine biological stations at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and South Harpswell, Maine, as the most academic of students. He died at New Haven, while still in the service of his business house. The names Collinsiella tuberculata, Setchell and Gardener, a genus of green algae, and Phaeosaccion collinsii, Farlow, a species of brown algae, commemorate his many years of scientific devotion.
Collins achieved recognition as the foremost American algologist of his time; he completely revised the algological collections of Harvard, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Boston Society of Natural History; and he issued, at great labor and expense, many complete sets of typical specimens of all the American marine algae. His works upon the life histories of algae, a subject fraught with especial importance in the biological theories of sex, were pioneering studies of great value.
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In person Collins was urbane, cultivated, and courteous.
Collins was married to Anna Lendrum Holmes in 1875.
