Background
Campbell was born on December 16, 1859 in Detroit, Michigan, the fifth of the six children of James Valentine and Cornelia Hotchkiss. The first three decades of his life were spent in Michigan.
Douglas Houghton Campbell
500 S State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
University of Michigan
107 S Indiana Ave, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
Indiana University Bloomington
450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
Stanford University
Douglas Houghton Campbell
500 S State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
University of Michigan
107 S Indiana Ave, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
Indiana University Bloomington
450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
Stanford University
Douglas Houghton Campbell
https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Structural-Systematic-Schools-Elementary-ebook/dp/B018PJ6844/?tag=2022091-20
1890
https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Development-Mosses-Ferns-Archegoniatae/dp/1112304355/?tag=2022091-20
1895
https://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Evolution-Douglas-Houghton-Campbell/dp/1341832252/?tag=2022091-20
1899
https://www.amazon.com/University-Text-Book-Douglas-Houghton-Campbell/dp/B00AOO2FP0/?tag=2022091-20
1902
Campbell was born on December 16, 1859 in Detroit, Michigan, the fifth of the six children of James Valentine and Cornelia Hotchkiss. The first three decades of his life were spent in Michigan.
Campbell first studied at Detroit High School (until 1878), then at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1878-1882), where he received his master’s degree. He then returned to Detroit High School to teach botany (1882-1886). He received his doctorate from Michigan in 1886 on the basis of studies carried out on the structure and fertilization of fern gametophytes.
Campbell's working habits from the time he was a student set the pattern for the rest of his life. He taught in the mornings, researched in the afternoons and evenings, and by living at home accumulated enough money to support himself for two years of research in Germany (1886 to 1888). After working in Berlin, Bonn, and Tiibingen, he returned to the United States and was appointed professor of botany at the University of Indiana (1888-1891). His second and final appointment was to the chair of botany (1891-1925) at the newly founded Stanford University. In the remaining twenty-seven years he lived in his own house on the campus as an emeritus professor.
Campbell’s first paper appeared in 1881 when he was in his early twenties, his last in 1947, when he was nearly ninety. Botany in the 1880’s was dominated by the German school of cytologists led by E. A. Strasburger. Campbell read Hofmeister’s The Higher Cryplogamia (1862) in his student days at Michigan. It fired him with enthusiasm for the study of the Cryptogamia. Filling in the details of Hofmeister’s scheme and constructing a phylogenetic tree for the plant kingdom occupied the attention of a growing number of botanists and cytologists during the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. To this program of research Campbell contributed both during his two years in Germany and afterward. Along with F. O. Bower, the British expert on plant phylogeny, Campbell contributed to the theoretical discussions on the subject of the origins of a land flora. His book The Structure and Development of the Mosses and Ferns (1895) was a landmark in the history of the subject and supplied the first systematic review since Hofmeister’s classic. Campbell’s textbook was used in virtually all university botany departments so that before the turn of the century its author was universally known. His reputation was further enhanced by his Lectures on the Evolution of Plants (1899). These textbooks combined original findings with summaries of published work in a form suitable for the student.
In a highly competitive field, to which a great number of botanists contributed, Campbell supplied numerous details gained from very careful study of material. While working in German laboratories, Campbell was introduced to the techniques of microtome sectioning of tissue embedded in paraffin wax. He quickly wrote up an account of this technique as applied to botanical material and published it in the Botanical Gazette for the benefit of American botanists. In his own hands it yielded him a most important find - the discovery of the precise manner of formation of the archegonia and antheridia in the eusporangiate ferns.
Campbell died on February 24, 1953, in Stanford, California.
Campbell's style of writing was inferior to that of his friend Bower, which may partly explain why to all but a few Campbell is a forgotten name, a man who lingered on while the fashion of the science he knew and loved changed almost beyond recognition. In part this is because he did not broaden his work in the direction of palaeo-botany to anything like the extent that Bower did. Whereas Bower wrote for the advanced student, Campbell wrote for the beginning student. Some of his popular writings - An Outline of Plant Geography, for instance - were judged very superficial.
Campbell’s most important contribution was to link the ferns with the liverworts by way of Anthoceros. When his book The Structure and Development of Mosses and Ferns appeared, popular opinion, which included Bower’s, had it that the leptosporangiate ferns were the more primitive and were descended directly from the algae and that the mosses and liverworts constitute a parallel evolution. Campbell’s suggestion of the anthocerotean origin of the eusporangiate pteridophytes is now generally accepted, and it is for this idea and for his associated belief in the primitive character of the Eusporangiatae that he is remembered.
Campbell never married.
