Francis Whittier Pennell was born August 4,
1886 on a farm near Wawa, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and died of a heart
attack while attending Meeting at Media, on Sunday, February 3, 1952. He is
survived by his wife, Anne, a son, and by several brothers and sisters. He
was educated at Westtown School and the University of Pennsylvania, receiving
here the degrees of B. S. in 1911 and Ph.D. in 1913. From 1914 to 1921 he was
on the staff of the New York Botanical Garden, and then became Curator of
Plants at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
Early showing an interest in Nature, he was
encouraged by local amateur botanists, among whom he noted Dr. Willima
Trimble as having been especially helpful. It was the head of the Botany
Department of the University of Pennsylvania, the late Dr. John M.
Macfarlane, who stimulated him to take up Botany as his life work. Enthusiastic
over Darwin's views as to the evolution of floral and other features through
natural selection, Macfarlane was especially interested in the bearing of the
Scrophulariaceae on that field, and suggested the study of members of this
family as a topic for a doctoral thesis. The outcome is known to every
taxonomist: Francis W. Pennell became a world authority on this complex plant
family.
He was a prolific writer, not only on this
group, but on various other plants, on taxonomic problems in general, and on
botanical history. Complete lists of his writings will be duly published
elsewhere; here may be mentioned the major work to which every student of the
flora of the southern Appalachians turns for useful keys to and copious
information upon the "scrophs," "The Scrophulariaceae of
Eastern Temperate North America: Monograph 1, Academy of Natural Sciences of
Philadelphia, 650 pages, 1935."
In 1927 I had the privilege of driving him on
a month-long auto trip to study the genus Chelone in the
Appalachians and Interior Plateau country; and in 1931, on a longer one to
study the members of the family in the western states, under a grant from the
National Research Council. I was impressed, first, by his active mind: he was
ever observing phenomena and relationships among the plants we encountered --
and not by any means only those of his chosen family -- and discussing them
in an interesting way, indeed continuing even when circumstances diverted my
attention elsewhere. I was further impressed by the extent to which an
interest in science would overcome handicaps. As a youth, Francis told me
that he was delicate, and had been excused from farm duties. He had thereby
attained a sort of inferiority complex concerning mechanical devices, and was
unable to master even such an operation as applying an air hose to a valve to
fill a sagging tire. He had early been admonished that getting ones' feet wet
could lead to illness, and had gained an extreme aversion to water (I did all
the collecting of aquatic scrophs). And he would shrink in fear at the approaching
of a barking dog or even a curious cow. Correspondingly, he was proud of his
control over non-mechanical things: thus, when we crossed a standard-time
boundary line, he promptly changed his watch accordingly. However, his
intellectual curiosity was so powerful that he was able to surmount these and
other difficulties, and do a vast amount of productive field work, even in
the wilds of South America. His loss is keenly felt by the professional and
amateur botanists of the Philadelphia Botanical Club, of which he was for
some years President, as well as by taxonomists throughout the world.
