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George Henry Hamilton Tate was an English-born American zoologist and botanist.
Background
He was born in London on April 30, 1894. He was the son of Septimus George Tate, an administrator for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, and Elizabeth Hamilton Tate. The family immigrated to Canada in 1895, moved briefly to the United States in 1902, then returned to England for nine years. In 1912 they settled finally in the United States, where Septimus Tate joined the New York office of his firm.
Education
George Tate attended schools in both England and Canada. He entered the British army in 1914, serving with the infantry and later with the Royal Corps of Engineers. After the war Tate studied briefly at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London.
At the age of thirty-three, he was awarded the B. S. degree by Columbia University.
Tate completed the M. S. at Columbia in 1931. He received the Ph. D. from the University of Montreal in 1938.
Career
From 1912 until 1914 he was a Western Union telegraph operator on Fire Island, N. Y. Then for nearly a year he managed a lime plantation on the island of Dominica in the British West Indies. In the fall of 1920 he taught school for one term at the Newton (N. J. ) Academy.
Tate joined the staff of the American Museum of Natural History as a field assistant early in 1921, although he had completed only a year of college. He then began a decade of yearly trips to South America, sponsored by the museum, that made him an expert on the mammals of that area. In the first year he joined George K. Cherrie and Geoffrey T. Gill on their American Museum expedition to Ecuador, and returned to Ecuador in 1922 and in 1923-1924. The next year he traveled to Mt. Turumiquire, Venezuela, and in 1926 to Bolivia. He joined the American ornithologist Frank M. Chapman on expeditions to Mt. Roraima, Brazil, in 1927-1928 and to Mt. Duida, Venezuela, in 1928-1929. During this period Tate specialized in the smaller mammalian fauna of South America, particularly marmosets, which remained his principal research interest until 1935.
Many of his published treatments of South American mammal groups were more thorough and comprehensive than previous studies--his Systematic Revision of the Marsupial Genus Marmosa (1933), for example, was a major study of South American mouse opossums. Between 1921 and 1934 Tate also pursued formal studies.
In 1928 he became an American citizen.
In 1935 Tate turned his attention to the mammals of tropical regions other than South America, beginning with those of Australia and New Guinea. He accompanied Richard Archbold on an expedition to British New Guinea in 1936-1937, the first of two journeys to the Southwest Pacific. The next year he returned to South America to complete fieldwork on Mt. Auyantepui, Venezuela, and in 1939-1940 he took an expedition to the Ivory Coast, French Cameroons, and Liberia to secure specimens for the chimpanzee and mandrill habitat groups in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the museum. Tate became associate curator of mammals in 1942.
World War II interrupted his own researches, but late in the same year he was sent to Brazil as exploration chief for the Rubber Development Corporation, part of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. It had been anticipated that his search for new rubber sources would last for several years, but the development of synthetic rubber in the United States came much sooner than expected and his mission was ended after a year.
During the latter part of the war he was a member of the advisory committee of the Pacific Science Conference of the National Research Council. After the war Tate made fewer field trips, in part, perhaps, because of less robust health. Promoted to curator of mammals in 1946, he made his last trip to wild country in 1947-1948, when he visited Cape York, Australia, again under the auspices of the Archbold expeditions, to study the kangaroos and wallabies of this area.
Tate was also particularly interested in the rodents and marsupials of Asia and Malaysia. He had undertaken research on Asian squirrels in various European museums in 1929 and again in 1937. He made a final trip for this purpose in 1951.
Tate was respected for the scope and comprehensiveness of his published works. He contributed to The Pacific World (1944), edited by Fairfield Osborn, and wrote Mammals of the Pacific World (1945) with T. D. Carter and J. E. Hill. He also published A List of Mammals of the Japanese War Areas (1944) and Mammals of Eastern Asia (1947). His more than ninety articles included general revisions of a number of mammal groups. Tate's Archbold expedition reports demonstrated a thorough competence and presented results that were in the forefront of contemporary taxonomic work.
Good-natured when at ease, Tate was singleminded when directing an expedition. In the field he worked long hours, as many of the mammals he studied were nocturnal, but he was extremely helpful to younger colleagues. A man of clear goals, Tate was impatient with organizational detail and committee work. He therefore found his association with the American Museum to be ideally suited to his temperament, for during his tenure the department of mammals was loosely structured, each curator being free to concentrate on his own specialties and concerns.
Tate's scientific interests extended to other fields as well. He collected a number of plants and insects not previously described in the literature, and was made a fellow of the American Geographical Society for his papers on geography and ecology.
In his last years Tate suffered from chronic leukemia and was troubled by lingering effects of several diseases contracted in Africa. As a result some of his later taxonomic treatments of complex groups were less carefully done than his earlier studies. His last published monograph, which appeared in 1948, dealt with the anatomy and evolution of kangaroos and wallabies; a revision of his work on the squirrels of Asia and Malaysia remained unfinished at his death. He tended to view problems of mammalian interrelationships very broadly and made some assumptions in this area that may not have been warranted. His work as a whole, however, provided an invaluable foundation for later mammalogists.
Tate was a long-time member of the American Society of Mammalogists, and was vice-president of that group at the time of his death in Morristown, N. J.
Connections
On April 17, 1930, he married Eleanor Elizabeth Merriam; they had no children.