Background

William Morton Wheeler was born in Milwaukee, Wis. , the first of six children of Julius Morton and Caroline Georgiana (Anderson) Wheeler. His father, a native of Watertown, N. Y. , had moved west to Milwaukee, where he eventually owned a tannery. His mother, born in Leamington, England, of Scandinavian-Scottish and Welsh descent, had come to the United States in 1858 and settled in Racine, Wis.

Education

Wheeler began his formal education at the Englemann German Academy in Milwaukee and later attended its affiliated normal college. He completed the normal-school course. At Clark University in Worcester, Massachussets he published ten papers on entomological subjects and received the Ph. D. degree in 1892.

Career

He had early developed an interest in natural history and accepted a position at the Natural Science Establishment of Henry Augustus Ward in Rochester, N. Y. , then the headquarters of taxidermy in America, where he remained about a year, identifying and listing zoological specimens. It was while there that he formed a lasting friendship with Carl Akeley, who later came to be regarded as the father of modern taxidermy. In June 1885 Wheeler returned to Milwaukee to accept a position as teacher of German and developmental physiology in the Milwaukee High School, where his old friend George Williams Peckham had recently introduced notably advanced work in biology. During the next few years he also spent much of his spare time at the Lake Laboratory, recently established in Milwaukee by Edward P. Allis, Jr. The staff there consisted of Drs. Charles Otis Whitman, William Patten, and Howard Ayres, all of whom were actively working in the field of developmental morphology. Wheeler was shown the latest embryological techniques and was encouraged to make a study of the embryology of the roach Blatta germanica, the results of which he published in 1889. After serving as custodian of the Milwaukee Public Museum for about three years (1887 - 90), Wheeler accepted a research fellowship at Clark University in Worcester, Massachussets, where Whitman had just become professor of zoology. His thesis, "A Contribution to Insect Embryology, " was published in the Journal of Morphology in 1893 and has been generally recognized as a classic in the field of embryology. In 1893 Wheeler accepted a position as instructor in embryology at the University of Chicago, to which Whitman had recently moved. As preparation for his new duties he spent the academic year 1893-94 on leave in Europe, visiting the Zoological Institute of the University of Würzburg, the Naples Zoological Station, and the Institut Zoologique at Liège in Belgium. Although he taught embryology during his five years at Chicago, about half of the score of papers which he published during this period were entomological in nature. In 1899 Wheeler accepted a professorship in zoology at the University of Texas. This position gave him the opportunity to make a variety of field studies on the insects of that part of the country, then little known. Most of his studies dealt with ants, in which he had been interested for several years and which were to claim his attention during the remainder of his life. He resigned the position in Texas in 1903 to accept the curatorship of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Here he organized the display of specimens in the public galleries and worked on the research collection of insects. He completed about eighty papers while at the museum, nearly all dealing with various aspects of ants, from descriptions of new species to detailed accounts of their structure, functions, distribution, habits, and social relations. His most notable publication of this period was the volume entitled Ants: Their Structure, Development and Behavior (1910). After five years at the Museum of Natural History, Wheeler accepted a professorship of entomology at the Bussey Institution, a graduate school of applied biology at Harvard University. He remained at Harvard for almost thirty years, serving as dean of the faculty of the Bussey Institution from 1915 to 1929. In 1931, along with other members of the Bussey Institution, he transferred to Harvard's new Biological Laboratories in Cambridge. Retiring in 1934, he continued his research at the Biological Laboratories almost without interruption until his sudden death, from heart failure, three years later. He died in Cambridge and was buried there in Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

Achievements

• Wheeler's scientific contributions were both extensive and diverse. He was a man of encyclopedic learning, and he always took satisfaction in the pursuit of minute details; but he was more concerned in his thinking with the significant patterns of things and events. His scientific interests, centered on the social insects, transcended the conventional biological fields and led him into psychology and sociology. He was also a man of letters. In his early days, at the Englemann Academy, he was devoted to the classics, and in later years his reading included the literature of many languages, both ancient and modern. His more philosophical essays reflected a sensitive feeling for style and good workmanship, with a polish rarely found in scientific writings. His bibliography includes over 450 titles. Although most of his publications are concerned with insects, a large number deal with problems of evolution, ecology, behavior, and the social life of animals in general. Several of his writings appeared in book form, for example, Social Life among the Insects (1923), The Social Insects, Their Origin and Evolution (1928), Demons of the Dust (1930), and Foibles of Insects and Men (1928). Wheeler was the recipient of many honors. Four universities awarded him honorary doctorates: Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, and California. He received the Elliot Medal of the National Academy of Sciences and the Leidy Medal of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. He was an officer in the French Legion of Honor and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Works

More photos

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  • New and Little Known Ants of the Genera Macromischa, Croesomyrmex and Antillaemyrmex (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from New and Little Known Ants of the Genera Macr...)

  • Social Life Among the Insects: Being a Series of Lectures Delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in March 1922 (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Social Life Among the Insects: Being a Serie...)

  • The Ants of the Baltic Amber

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Collected Papers on Ants

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Ants And Some Other Insects: An Inquiry Into The Psychic Powers of These Animals

    (Ants And Some Other Insects: An Inquiry Into The Psychic ...)

  • The Origin of Slavery among Ants

    (This book gathered works to understand slavery from a stu...)

  • Ants: Their Structure, Development and Behavior (Classic Reprint)

    (A nts: Their Structure, Development and Behavior was writ...)

  • Ants; Their Structure, Development and Behavior

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Studies on Myrmecophiles, 1908, Vol. 1: Cremastochilus (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Studies on Myrmecophiles, 1908, Vol. 1: Crem...)

  • Mosaics and Other Anomalies Among Ants

    (Cambridge 1937 1st Harvard University. hardcover octavo.,...)

  • Essays in philosophical biology,

    (Cambridge 1939 1st Harvard University. 8vo., 261pp., hard...)

  • Ants and some other insects; an inquiry into the psychic powers of these animals

Connections

At the University of Chicago he met and on June 28, 1898, married Dora Bay Emerson of Rockford, Ill. Two children, Adaline Emerson and Ralph Emerson, resulted from this marriage.

Father:

Julius Morton Wheeler

Mother:

Caroline Georgiana (Anderson) Wheeler

Spouse:

Dora Bay Emerson

Friend:

Carl Akeley