Henry E. Crampton Papers on the Genus Partula

Collection

Identifier: ANSP-Coll-0755

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

Correspondence, field notes, maps, charts, and original data, all unprocessed save for oversize drawings.

Includes much original data and manuscripts relating to land snails of Tahiti. Original records for collections and research on South Pacific land snails, many of them now extinct, including field notes. Biographical and personal information included. Much of the original data are morphometric measurments and statistical analyses.

Original box 12 of 12 contained numerous black and white negatives of landscapes and geography of Guam, Saipan, and other Pacific and South East Asian locales, with correspondence with US Office of Strategic Services, 1944

Lots of Partula species descriptions and data drafts of arcticles and gallies and markups particularly for "Studies on the variation, distribution, and evolution of the genus Partula. The Species of the Mariana Islands, Guam and Saipan" Reciepts and requests from OSS (Office of Strategic Services) for pictures of Guam taken by Crampton A lot of the data on the species comes from the collections of the British Museum and the Bishop museum Don't get too hung up on the dates. Sometimes a date on a file doesn't match the dates inside, getting the sense maybe this is a different between date of collection and date that Crampton compiled, reviewed, or first saw the specimen in a collection??? The Raiatea specimen data and drafts do not match the only article I was able to find on that Island: New species of land snails of the genus Partula from Raiatea, Society Islands. American Museum novitates ; no. 1761, 1956. The order was mostly established as alphabetical (unknown if that was Crampton's doing or the doing of the previous processor(s). The decision was made to keep that alphabetical order, which did lead to draft chapters of a possibly unpuplished manuscript being organized in among the date.

Dates

1879, 1892-1893, 1904-1955, undated
Majority of material found within 1904 - 1955

Creator

Crampton, Henry E. (1875-1956) (Person)

Biographical note

Henry Edward Crampton was born January 5, 1875 in New York to Dr. Henry Edward Crampton (1837-1899), and Dorcas Matilda Miller Crampton (d. 1882). Crampton began his undergraduate education at the College of the City of New York before transferring to Columbia University where he completed an A.B. in 1893 and then his PhD in 1899. While earning his advanced degree he worked as an assistant at Columbia and as an instructor in Biology at MIT. After his PhD he continued working at Columbia and eventually became a professor in 1904. He worked at Columbia and Barnard College until his retirement in 1943. In addition to Crampton taught embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and was in charge of embryology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the early 1900s. He also served as curator of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History.

Crampton’s major work involved the study of the genus Partula – land snails in the South Pacific. After years of studying evolutionary biology in the lab he moved to the field focusing many years on the island of Mo’orea in French Polynesia as well as Raiatea, Tahiti and several other Islands in the South Pacific. Crampton also studied and measured many specimens of Partula in the collections of the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, the British Museum of Natural History in London, the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (now the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University). These studies resulted in a number of detailed monographs.

Crampton married Marion Maud Tully on October 27, 1896 and they had two children – Helen Marion Crampton and Henry Edward Crampton, Jr.

Crampton died in New York on February 26, 1956. Specimens collected by Crampton and originally housed at the American Museum of Natural History were transferred to the Academy in the 1960s and his archival records related to the study of and publication on the genus Partula accompanied the specimens.