Ernst Mayr, a retrospective.

During the late summer of 1979, Ernst Mayr and I (Figure 1) had finished editing The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology [1]. He knew that I was working on a long essay about Theodosius Dobzhansky and also planning a book about Sewall Wright. From his farm in Wilton, New Hampshire, Ernst handwrote me a letter (Figure 2) from which this excerpt is taken: ‘In your work, both on Dobzhansky and on Wright, please always remember that a scientist’s achievement may lie in many different areas: As an innovator (new discoveries, new theories, new concepts), as a synthesiser (bringing together scattered information, sharing relationships and interactions, particularly between different disciplines, like genetics and taxonomy), as a disseminator (presenting specialized information and theory in such a way that it becomes accessible to nonspecialists [popularizer is a misleading term]), as a compiler or cataloguer, as an analyst (dissecting complex issues, clarifying matters by suggesting new terminologies, etc.), and in other ways.’ Perhaps Mayr was really thinking of his own, manyfaceted scientific career, rather than the careers of Dobzhansky andWright. Here, I evaluateMayr’s scientific career according to his own categories. All of Mayr’s work on the systematics of birds fits into his category of compiler or cataloguer. He began this work as a graduate student and continued until he was 97 years old. From the beginning of his work in New Guinea and the South Sea Islands, Mayr tried to catalog and organize the birds in these regions from an evolutionary perspective. Most of his day-to-day scientific work from the beginning of his participation in the Whitney South Sea Expedition (1927–1930) until he left the American Museum in New York for the Museum of Comparative