The Value of Older Non‐English Literature

Abstract

I think that when my cohort of graduate students finished in 1976 a foreign language requirement was becoming less common as part of receiving a Ph.D. We had to demonstrate proficiency by reading a paper in our language of choice other than English, and then answering questions about it from a faculty member who had proficiency in that language. It was also around that time that some students were given permission to demonstrate facility in a programming language (e.g., BASIC or FORTRAN) rather than a foreign language. A recent query on ECOLOG-L only turned up a few examples of graduate programs that still require foreign language facility for native English speakers. My impression is that students now hardly ever encounter ecological literature in a language other than English. For example the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland has for several years conducted its annual meeting talks and posters in English, and the Japanese Ecological Society has a prize for the best presentation by a student in English. The joint annual meeting of the British and French ecological societies in 2014, held in France, was also in English. This linguistic trend makes it less likely that ecologists will access non-English literature. This change has also been accompanied over the past several decades by a changed view of the value of natural history, reflected both in funding opportunities (when was the last time a proposal with a primarily natural history focus was funded by the National Science Foundation?), and a bias toward experimental approaches by reviewers for the top journals. Although there are some signs of a minor resurgence of interest and recognition of the value of natural history (Middendorf and Pohlad 2014), such as the formation of a new section of the Ecological Society of America a few years ago, in my view it still languishes, to the detriment of ecological insights. I was fortunate to have spent a few years in France as a child, and studied German in college and as a new faculty member preparing for a NATO postdoctoral position in Austria. This gave me access to a body of literature that would otherwise have been inaccessible; there was no Internet or Google Translate at that time. When I was preparing for my postdoctoral research I was inspired by having learned about ant–plant mutualisms as a student in an OTS course, and it turned out there were several important papers in that field in German from the early 1900s and even in the late 1800s. Those early naturalists working in the tropics and temperate zones preceded what seemed in the 1960s like pioneering studies by Dan Janzen on Acacia–ant interactions in Central America. This German literature included work by Rutger Sernander (1906), who wrote a monograph about European myrmechochorous plants, and Friedrich Morton (1912) wrote about the influence of ants in seed dispersal mediated by elaiosomes. Long before “coevolution” appeared in the English literature, Anton Kerner von Marilaun (1896 translation of 1894–1895 original) wrote about ants protecting plants in southeastern Europe, and Meierhofer (1907) wrote about the “methods of protection of plants against the attack of animals,” including the ant–plant mutualisms of Cecropia trees that I first learned about in 1972 on an OTS course. Even decades prior there was a series of notes in the Botanisches Centralblatt in 1887–1889 about ant–plant mutualisms, extrafloral nectaries, and ant–plant interactions in the neotropics. Some of these were summaries of “Botanic Discussion Evenings” of the Royal [Kaiserlichköniglichen] Zoological and Botanical Society in Vienna, which included discussions of the samples that had been received recently from the naturalist Fritz Müller (as in Mullerian mimicry, and Mullerian bodies on Cecropia trees). A figure from Kerner von Marilaun, 1896 translation, showing a European ant-plant, which I studied in Austria in 1978. This is also the era when Thomas Belt (as in Beltian bodies on Acacia trees) was writing about natural history in Nicaragua (Belt 1874), and while he wrote in English, some of his work on ant-plants may have inspired the interest in ant-plants by the German naturalists. His book has the distinction of having been reviewed in Nature by Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin wrote, “it appears to me the best of all natural history journals which have ever been published.” Cover from Franceé's (1906) book on “The Love-life of Plants.” Perhaps unrealistic in that the attraction of ants through extrafloral nectar may in reality be timed to prevent them from deterring pollinators. Richard von Wettstein (1888) even did ant exclusion experiments, putting wool soaked in oil and camphor on plants to deter ant visitation to investigate the benefits of ant attendance to a European composite. When I worked at the Botanical Institute at the University of Vienna in 1978, I was surprised and pleased to find a hand-lettered label from von Wettstein on a sample jar I needed from the supply room. There is some other older English literature on ant-plants from over a hundred years ago, such as William Trelease's article (1889) on myrmecophilism, but the importance of non-English literature for his study is documented in his bibliography, with 11 articles in English, 11 in German, 5 in Italian, 3 in Latin, 2 in French, and 1 in Dutch. Thus, a scientist in his era must have had facility in a variety of languages. So my paper trail extends back to some of these early natural historians in Austria and Germany. Their work helped give me a much longer historical perspective than I would have had if I'd relied just on the English literature on ant–plant mutualisms, primarily from the 1960s on. Although as a graduate student I was able to track down the original publications from the 1880s in libraries, I see that some of this literature is now freely available on Web resources such as ReadAnyBook.com, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, or old scientific literature scanned by Google Books. And the translation from Google Translate I just tried with some of von Wettstein's 1888 papers is certainly sufficient to follow most of the content. So perhaps the only barrier to familiarity with older non-English literature for ecologists now is the time required to find it. Time that might be well spent to broaden your perspective and make sure you're not re-discovering insights from early natural historians.