Members present:
Jerry Melillo (President), Bill Schlesinger (Past-President), Nancy Grimm (President-elect), Gus Shaver (Vice President for Science), Norm Christensen (Vice President for Finance), Alison Power (Vice President for Public Affairs), Carol Brewer (Vice President for Education and Human Resources), Shahid Naeem and Margaret Palmer (Members-at-Large).

Staff present:
Katherine McCarter (Executive Director), Cliff Duke (Director of Science), Nadine Lymn (Director of Public Affairs), David Baldwin (Managing Editor), Elizabeth Biggs (Director of Finance), Jason Taylor (Director of Education), Sue Silver (Editor)

I. ROLL CALL

A) The GB unanimously adopted the proposed agenda.

B) There were no votes to ratify.

• Brief discussion of what the last fiscal year’s profit (approximately $9000) represents, where it should be invested (Christensen suggested the rainy day fund, which currently has about $200,000), and how to respond to questions from ESA members about it.
  
• Margaret Palmer reminded the Board that strenuous efforts were made in 2004 by the nominating committee, chaired by Ann Bartuska, to find women to run, but they were unsuccessful. Bill Schlesinger, chair of the 2005 nominating committee, reported that the nomination process is well along and the slate is likely to include women.

C) The minutes from 31 July, 1 August, and 6 August 2004 were unanimously adopted.

II. REPORTS

A) Report of President Melillo

• Melillo has focused on two tasks since the August meeting—establishing rapid assessment teams in cooperation with Nadine Lymn, and developing a review of the Science Office in cooperation with Gus Shaver and Cliff Duke
  
• Rapid Assessment teams—41 of 58 people invited to join the rapid response teams have now responded, so there are three people on all but one of them now. Eighteen have been Leopold Fellows.
  
• Review of Science Office—focus will be on future activities of the Science Office and how they relate to ESA’s strategic plan; history and current activities will also be covered.

B) Report of Executive Director McCarter and the Office Staff

• David Baldwin reported that all publications are on track for publication timetables, and that starting in 2005 all authors will be getting proofs as PDF files. All ESA publications back to 1997 (the first year when publications were produced with SGML tagging) will soon have DOI tags and be in the CrossRef database. You will soon be able to do forward linking too (looking for papers that cited a particular paper). A new set of tools will soon be instituted for copy editors, which will speed up their work (and reduce its cost). Google will now start sending their web crawlers through ESA journals about every 6 weeks, which should generate a large number of hits from searches of our journals in the future.
  
• Sue Silver reported that, since Frontiers’ inception, authors have received PDF files of their proofs. Frontiers will have a booth at two scientific conferences in November, and the Special Libraries Association Conference (4–7 June, Toronto). The Visions articles will likely appear in the March issue.
  
• Jason Taylor reported that there is a November deadline for the third volume of TIEE. SEEDS will have a field trip to Louisiana soon, and will send a representative to three conferences this winter (American Indian Association of Science and Engineering (AISES), in Anchorage; Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), in Austin, Texas; North American Association of Environmental Education (NAAEE), in Biloxi, Mississippi). A new employee will join the educational program in January.
  
• Liz Biggs: ESA had 8718 members at the end of the fiscal year (a big jump up—about 900 in 2 years). Participation in Chapters and Sections has also increased in most cases. The e-version of the iMIS database is being rolled out this week, for real-time updating by members of their membership information. The biggest issue relates to the future of journal subscriptions, especially institutional subscriptions. Member subscriptions have been declining over the past several years. (ESA’s budget anticipates a 4%/yr decline in personal subscriptions.)
  
• Nadine Lymn reported that the position of policy analyst has now been filled. A new initiative is to build a database of universities and other institutions with researchers who publish regularly in ESA journals, to create a news service for Public Information Officers that alerts them when someone from their institution publishes in a Society journal.
  
• Cliff Duke reported that there were about 50 applications for three positions in the National Parks Ecological Research fellowship program. Norm Christensen reported that the Mellon Foundation is likely to withdraw support for this program in about 2 years unless other major partners are found as donors. The fundraising is NPS’ responsibility and and they have not yet begun to seek the needed resources.

C) Report of Vice President for Finance Christensen

1) First Quarter Financials look healthy, according to Katherine. The Annual Meeting did very well (might be the top meeting for income to date). This is due in part to a trial policy whereby the abstract submission fee was not refunded or credited toward the cost of registration (generating about $90,000). Next year, credit card numbers will be taken, but no charge will be made unless the submitter withdraws.

2) Norm Christensen reports that the Society investments are mostly flat.

3) The staff and VP for Finance recommend pursuing the idea of hiring a development professional to work with ESA. This idea will be pursued with the goal of making a presentation to the Board at the spring meeting. There is general support for the idea of a professional fund-raiser.

III. DISCUSSION/ACTION ITEMS

A) Publications issues

1) Data sharing

a) Data sharing statement (Baldwin/Duke)

The meeting of 12 scientific societies hosted by ESA went very well and included representatives from Chile and England. Bill Michener and David Baldwin were ESA representatives. Clarification of terms was an important achievement (e.g., What is a data set? Are herbarium sheets and soil samples data? What is a data registry?—like a phone book. What is a data center?—a place where metadata and data are stored). A near-term strategy will be to establish an editorial policy for scientific journals. The meeting attendees proposed a statement to be considered by each group’s governing body: “It is the expectation of the editors and publisher of this journal that authors will make the data underlying published articles available. Any impediments to data sharing should be brought to the attention of the editors at the time of submission.” The ESA Governing Board developed a revision of this statement that will be reviewed by the Publications Committee before being placed in ESA journals. “The editors and publisher of this journal expect authors to make the data underlying published articles available.”

NSF may be the driving force behind this, at least for grantees, but editors could also carry a big stick by eventually enforcing a data-sharing policy for authors. National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII; a broad, collaborative program to provide increased access to data and information on the nation’s biological resources) might be interested in helping with development of a registry and repository. Perhaps ESA could help to effect a cultural change in ideas about the importance and value of data archiving by publishing a paper with examples of how historical data have facilitated newer studies, or how the lack of such data has removed opportunities for potentially valuable follow-up studies.

b) Data registry proposal

Jim Reichman asked the Board to begin discussion about creating a data registry for ESA members and for contributors to ESA journals, using technology currently being developed. The Board, after extensive discussion of Reichman’s proposal, concluded that they were not yet ready to endorse a specific proposal for a data registry. Several groups are pursuing related initiatives and ESA sees the need to bring these groups together to discuss strategy and ensure that any ESA effort is inclusive. Nancy Grimm, David Inouye, and Margaret Palmer, working with David Baldwin and Cliff Duke, will form an ad hoc committee to coordinate ESA activities related to the data sharing. Jim Reichman will be invited to join that group.

2) Publications task force

Jim Reichman has contacted the Board already about issues related to online publications and the impact of open access, and recommends that a group be named to provide background material for the Board. He has asked the Board for some funding to facilitate this, and the Board approves unanimously the idea of using the contingency funding from the budget for this purpose. President Melillo will work with Jim to appoint the task force.

3) Frontiers program review

• Katherine reported on the history (dating from 1998) of the Publications Visions Committee (which presented a report to the Board in January 1999). That “Brown Report” was discussed at each Board meeting for the next few years, evolving into something more compatible with the Board’s goals of increasing membership and reaching out to audiences that might not be attracted by current publications.
  
• Sue Silver reported on current status and management of Frontiers. It has met the original criteria of being international, interdisciplinary, and accessible. It has almost certainly played a role in the significant increase in membership over the past two years. (Frontiers comes free of charge to ESA members.) Frontiers faces two major challenges in the near term: (1) attracting new readers from government and business; and (2) becoming self-supporting.
  
• Liz Biggs reported on finances. After 2 years of publication, and 3 years of funding, we are in good shape. The Publications Fund balance was ahead of budget by about $117,000 and will be close to $1,200,000 at the end of December, with a new Mellon Foundation grant of $750,000 just received. The business plan for Frontiers requires that an additional $750,000 be raised for the fund in support of Frontiers to cover costs until the journal becomes self-supporting through a mix of library subscriptions and advertising. Currently we have a $250,000 grant request before the Packard Foundation and we are beginning the planning to raise an additional $500,000). Based on our current business plan for Frontiers, the projection is that Frontiers will be self-supporting in 2011, or 10 years into its life. Norm Christensen reported that Packard might be willing to make a long-term low-interest loan if we have difficulty in raising the $500,000. The marketing goals seem to be on track for advertising and classified ads. Library subscriptions (70 so far) continue to be the biggest challenge. ESA is currently putting $50,000/yr into the Publications Fund that supports the project.

4) Journal mission statements

The Editors-in-Chief were asked by the Board to provide mission statements that might be a first step toward the upcoming review of publications. The Publications Committee has reviewed them and suggests that a uniform format would be useful. The Board agrees, and will ask (via a memo to be drafted by Jerry Melillo) that the EICs revise their statements for the next Board meeting. One alternative is that there be an overall umbrella statement about the Society’s suite of journals, followed by more detailed information about individual publications.

5) Pease letter response

Jerry has drafted a response to the letter sent to Board members by Dr. Craig Pease concerning editorial practices and policies of Frontiers. Sue will contact Mr. Rohrman asking him to remain as a columnist, but to resign as a member of the advisory board in order to remove any perception of a conflict of interest.

B) Visions priorities

1) Public information campaign

The ESA staff had a meeting on this topic. Nadine Lymn reported on some specific actions the Society might take, how to assess those efforts, and suggestions for people the Society might ask to become involved. The goal (#2) that seems to best match the Board’s intentions is (slightly modified): “Increase within 5 years public understanding of the essential role of ecological systems to the well-being of all people.” The Board will seek advice from some organizations that have run public information campaigns related to the environment; candidate organizations include Environmental Defense, WWF, SeaWeb, NASA, British Petroleum, Toyota, Weyerhauser, and UCS. Staff and a subset of Board members will organize a half-day meeting in late February with about five of these organizations to learn from their experiences. Questions to ask these organizations might include the following:

How to identify a target audience? What is the best topic area to begin with? What are the elements of a campaign? What are creative ideas for addressing the audience? Are there examples of successful campaigns such as this? What advertising firms would you use? What would it cost and how might we raise the resources needed for the campaign? How do you measure success?

2) Rapid response teams

Nadine Lymn reported on the roster of ESA members who have been invited (most of whom have accepted). Roll-out will be early in the spring, with two Congressional luncheon meetings.

3) International actions

Our next annual meeting in Montreal will be international in perspective, as will our special meeting in Merida, Mexico in January of 2006. The theme of the Mexico meeting is “Ecology in an Era of Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities for Environmental Scientists in the Americas,” and the planning committee is being led by Dr. Jose Sarukhan and Dr. Jeff Herrick. Cliff and Ellen will go to Merida this winter to look at hotels and venues for the meeting. Possible funding sources for meeting support are being contacted. Some SEEDS students would be a logical addition to that meeting. Osvaldo is working with Katherine to pursue support for ESA of a Federation of the Americas group of ecological societies. The Federation should play an important role in the Mexico meeting. Katherine met in August with the Vice President of the Ecological Society of Australia to explore possible cooperation in the future.

C. Education issues

1) Leveraging SEEDS

There are 4 more years of Mellon funding remaining, and efforts are needed to start planning for how to replace it (currently $500,000/yr). Ideas were discussed for how to find additional opportunities for SEEDS students and for the program. This seems like a logical program for work by an ESA development officer. SEEDS may play a (no-cost) role in a future IGERT program with the University of Maryland, which would fund three workshops for SEEDS students.

2) Women and Minorities in Ecology (WAMIE) update

Carol Brewer reports that the final report is on schedule for November. A survey will occur next year to generate a new Profiles of Society members (following up on the 1992 publication).

D. Issues for future annual meetings; 2006 Annual Meeting theme

The proposal, “Icons and Upstarts: Maintaining an Ecological Balance,” is innovative. The Board suggests dropping or replacing the part of the title after the colon. The Program Chair and Meetings Committee will be asked to consider these comments and bring back a final recommendation.

E. NEON update

Carol Brewer reported on progress, which includes AIBS having received funding from NSF to serve in an organizational role.

F. Science Program review (Shaver/Duke)

1) Vice-President for Science Gus Shaver presented an outline of his vision for the Science Office during his tenure, and questions for the Governing Board to consider in its review.

• Science Office mission and niche within ESA
  – Are they well-defined?
  – Are they appropriate?
  
• How well do activities reflect the mission and niche, as well as the environment in which it must work?
  
• Interactions with Policy and Education
  
• Committees: Merge Research and SBI ?
  
• 3-year goals for Science Office:
  – Support Visions initiatives
  – Maintain responsiveness to the ecological science community
  – Develop a new sustainability science agenda.

2) Cliff Duke presented information on the history of the office (initiated in 1992 in the form of the SBI Project Office, then became the Science Programs Office in 1997). The existing structure and goals are outlined in the Bylaws; in short, the Office promotes the integration of ecological science into management and decision-making by government agencies and the private sector at all levels. Although the Science Office produces educational publications (e.g., Issues in Ecology, the regional climate change reports) it does not engage with students and educators in the way Education does. Nor does it engage with legislators and Congressional staff in the way that Public Affairs does. Current projects include:

• i) providing support for ESA activities (e.g., Annual Meetings, the Ecological Information Network, publications);
  
• ii) planning and organizing scientific conferences (e.g., the invasive plants conference, the Mexico meeting);
  
• iii) providing support to science, policy, and management (e.g., peer reviews, the conference on data sharing, JSTOR, Sustainable Water Resources Roundtable, National Parks Ecological Research Fellowship program);
  
• iv) generating publications (e.g., Issues in Ecology, the regional climate change reports with UCS).

Projects in development include:

• i) an Agricultural Air Quality workshop;
  
• ii) a cooperative agreement with NBII;
  
• iii) workshops for the Army Corps of Engineers;
  
• iv) potential collaboration with UNEP and UNESCO;
  
• v) developing communication training programs for federal scientists;
  
• vi) a follow-up proposal to NSF for a joint working group on Data Sharing and Archiving.

As noted previously, the proposed new agenda for the Science Office has three components:

1. Support Visions initiatives
   
2. Maintain responsiveness to the ecological science community
   
3. Develop a new Sustainability Science Agenda
   

A high-priority item for action on this agenda is combining and reforming the SBI and Research committees into a single Science Committee to advise and support Science Office projects. Others include leading international outreach activities, and developing activities to examine and articulate the intellectual foundations for a new sustainability science.

Based on the discussions, Gus and Cliff will complete the following tasks before the next Board meeting:

1) Draft a new Bylaw statement about the Science Office, and prepare a proposal to delete the existing SBI office Bylaw, to be voted on at the Council meeting next summer.

2) Write a Bylaw about the new Science committee that reflects the merging of the Research and SBI committees, also for presentation at the Council meeting in Montreal, and discussion at the May Governing Board meeting.

3) Go through the list of people on the two current committees (Research and SBI), write to the individuals to see who is willing to stay on, and identify a few new members who will be useful in implementing the new SO agenda.

4) Prepare a Supplementary Session proposal on sustainability science for the Montreal meeting by 1 Dec.

5) Prepare proposals to NBII and NSF, as described previously, and move forward on planning and implementation of support for Visions initiatives and international outreach efforts.

IV. NEW BUSINESS

1) Nominations for ESA awards are due soon and suggestions should be sent to the Awards Committee.

2) Bill Schlesinger provided an update on nominations for Board members, officers, and committees for fall 2005.

Respectfully submitted
David Inouye

Back to Table of Contents

Human alteration of natural flood cycles is an important perturbation to floodplain plants. We report a demographic analysis of Boltonia decurrens, an endangered plant in the floodplains of the Illinois River. Navigation dams and levees have drastically altered the timing and severity of flooding over the past century. These changes reduce the population growth rate (deterministic and stochastic) of Boltonia and change the life history pathways responsible for its population growth.

This photo shows U.S. 67 west of Alton, Illinois, in July 1993 during a flood that affected a third of the United States and caused $18 billion in damages. Historical data shows that the stochastic growth rate of Boltonia has declined in the last 100 years because the regulation of the river has increased the frequency of these late-receding floods. The photograph, by Nancy Parker, is associated with the article by M. Smith, H. Caswell, and P. Mettler-Cherry, “Stochastic flood and precipitation regimes and the population dynamics of a threatened floodplain plant,” to be published in Ecological Applications 15(3), June 2005.

Look for the article by Marian Smith, Hal Caswell, and Paige Mettler-Cherry, “Stochastic flood and precipitation regimes and the population dynamics of a threatened floodplain plant,” in the June 2005 issue of Ecological Applications 15(3).

Many ants are effective predators of herbivores, but ants also frequently protect homopteran herbivores from their arthropod predators in return for carbohydrate-rich exudates. Ants thus can simultaneously exhibit multiple trophic roles as primary predators (via feeding upon herbivores), secondary predators (via feeding on predatory arthropods), and as facilitators of mutualist herbivores. We examined the spatial and temporal dynamics of pine (Pinus ponderosa) food webs that included the omnivorous ant Formica podzolica, using direct observation and stable isotopes. Formica podzolica is a predator of herbivorous and predatory arthropods, and a mutualist with the aphid Cinara schwarzii. Over the course of a single season, ant diet, and thus trophic position, shifted from being midway between that of a primary and secondary predator in early summer, to that of a primary predator by late summer. There was also significant spatial variation among trees in ant trophic position. Our results thus document that this ant fed at, or slightly above, the trophic position of primary predator, but that this trophic positioning varied both temporally and spatially. to the extent the spatial and temporal variation in F. prodzolica diet is similar to other ants or generalist predators, future food web models must accomodate these complex dynamics.

Look for the article by Kailen A. Mooney and Chadwick V. Tillberg, “Temporal and spatial variation to ant omnivory in pine forests,” in the May 2005 issue of Ecology 86(5).

Supplements are distinguished from appendices in that these are more likely to be downloaded and used rather than viewed. Supplements cover a range of file types, including original raw data, derived data sets, model source code, and statistical software. By submitting supplements to Ecological Archives, authors facilitate new analyses of their data, data validation, and development of critical software. Appropriate metadata (information about the data) are required in order to understand and re-use the data correctly and must be provided in a standard format. Data files should be submitted as delimited ASCII files and software must include the source code. Templates are available to help authors in submitting supplements ‹http://www.esapubs.org/archive/
archive_templates.htm›. The file list section on supplement pages provides direct links to the various data or software files for downloading. Fig. 4 shows an example of a supplement page.

Data papers constitute a third category of archives. These are compilations and syntheses of data sets and associated metadata that are peer-reviewed and considered valuable to the scientific community. For example, the Data Paper by Smith et al. (2003) is a compilation of body mass data for mammals worldwide for the purpose of investigating patterns of body mass across geographic and taxonomic space and evolutionary time. After passing peer review, data papers are announced in abstract form in Ecology. The accession number printed with the abstract is directly linked to the data paper in Ecological Archives.

A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 16: Robert Hooke and the Royal Society of London

Although the versatile Robert Hooke (1635–1703) was not an “early ecologist,” he made enough innovations and discoveries essential for the prehistory of ecology to merit our consideration. For too long, he was overshadowed by his formidable rival, Isaac Newton, but now there are four excellent biographies of Hooke: ‘Espinasse (1956) provides a brief overview, Drake (1996) provides a geological perspective on his life and career, and Inwood (2002) and Jardine (2004) provide detailed account of all aspects of his life. Another volume written by Bennett, Cooper, Hunter, and Jardine (2003) celebrates Hooke’s life and work on the 300th anniversary of his death. Finally, Nichols’ is a pleasant, brief study of Hooke’s relations with the Royal Society (1999), but it lacks the sophistication of Pumfrey’s article on the subject (1991). All of these books are well illustrated. A useful biographical article provides additional references (Pugliese 2004).

Hooke was born on the scenic Isle of Wight, two miles south of England’s mainland, and as a child he was fascinated by both its geological formations and its fossil shells. His preacher father died when he was 13, and he was apprenticed to a London artist. He had the talent to become an artist, but paint fumes affected him adversely, and so he was sent to Westminster School, where the headmaster, Dr. Richard Busby, recognized his genius and provided him not only with a solid academic education, but also had him trained as an instrument maker (Jardine 2004:63).

In 1653 Hooke entered Oxford University and soon became Robert Boyle’s laboratory assistant. He built an air pump for Boyle, and Hooke used it himself to demonstrate the hypothesis that became known as Boyle’s Law (1662). The Royal Society of London for Promoting Natural Knowledge was founded in 1660 and received a royal charter (but no money) from Charles II. The Society soon had 115 members (Stimson 1948:51), although only about 20 were active (Inwood 2002). It was inspired by and organized with the writings of Sir Francis Bacon in mind (Purver 1967:235–236). In 1662 Hooke became its curator, responsible for three or four experiments or demonstrations at each weekly meeting. This was an unrealistic expectation, but he came closer than anyone else could have done. By 1664 the Royal Society decided to pay him a modest annual stipend. In 1665 he became Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, and the Royal Society met often in his rooms there.

His book, Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses (1665) contains 9 months of his experiments and demonstrations. He used a commercial microscope, probably from instrument-maker Richard Reeve (Simpson 1989:37–41). His most famous observations and illustrations in it are of plant cells, which he discovered and named (Hooke 1961:112–116).

When he turned to insects, he commented that a large fly (such as the blue fly, Calliphora erythrocephala, he illustrated) at one time lays 400–500 eggs, and their numbers would increase prodigiously “were they not prey’d on by multitudes of Birds, and destroy’d by Frosts and Rains,” which led him to conclude that the absence of climatic checks causes the tropics to be “infested with such multitudes of Locusts, and such other Vermine.” (Hooke 1961:182). He concluded from watching blue flies that they were stimulated by putrefying meat to lay their eggs on it.

Power (1945) argues that some of Hooke’s most striking illustrations were made by his lifelong friend and colleague, Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723). Architect–scientist Wren had developed the techniques of drawing microscopic subjects, and the Royal Society had asked him to make insect drawings for Charles II. It was only because Wren had more compelling demands on his time that Hooke took up the project. In the preface to Micrographia Hooke praised Wren without specifically attributing any of the drawings to him. Power suspects that plates illustrating the head of a “drone fly,” a flea, and a louse (plates XXIV, XXXIV, and XXXV) are Wren’s, and possibly also plate XXXVI on two mites. Drawings of the fly head, flea, and louse are all gigantic; the flea, at 16.5 inches (43.5 cm) long, is surely the largest insect drawing in the scientific literature. It is ironic that Hooke published a large illustration of a flea in the very year that a plague epidemic struck London, killing almost 100,000. The Royal Society was alerted to the epidemic’s seriousness from the published bills of mortality and suspended its meetings in late June. Charles II also fled the city for safer climes (Gregg 1978:9–11). No one, of course, made the connection between the rat flea (Nosophyllus fasciatus) and the plague.

Since Hooke was uncertain about the possibility of spontaneous generation in small organisms, it is interesting that he discovered the eggs of mites. The mites themselves were barely visible to the naked eye, yet he undoubtedly found their eggs. He estimated that a mite is only one-hundredth of an inch thick, which means that there would be a million in a cubic inch, yet their eggs are only a 400th or 500th the size of the adult. “Notwithstanding which minuteness a good Microscope discovers those small moveable specks to be very prettily shap’d Insects, each of them furnish’d with eight well shap’d and proportion’d legs…” (Hooke 1961:213–214). He believed that a mite

But making one of each was not enough for Hooke; he was always thinking up better versions of his instruments, which explains why the indexes of Middleton’s histories of the barometer, thermometer, and weather instruments (1964, 1966, 1969), have longer entries under “Hooke” than for any other investigator-inventor.
The same is true for Bud and Warner’s encyclopedia of scientific instruments (1998).

Not only did he invent the instruments, he also developed and printed a meteorological form on which to record the data (Hooke 1958, Wolf 1950:308–313).

From the start, he and the Royal Society realized that any scientific study of weather required both a uniform set of records and a standard set of instruments (Patterson 1953). However, science was not yet well enough organized for these insights to be widely implemented. That would take another two centuries.

Robert Hooke, son of a clergyman, was a pious Christian as well as a brilliant scientist, yet he thought many students of Earth history exaggerated the importance of Noah’s flood to account for geological strata. From a modern perspective, we could say that he, in turn, exaggerated the importance of earthquakes to account for the same strata. But that was a small mistake when compared with his sophisticated approach to geology and Earth history. He studied and theorized on the shape of the earth, the wandering of the poles, cyclic terrestrial processes, fossil formation, and subterraneous eruptions and earthquakes causing changes from land to sea (Hooke 1996:96). He was one of the earliest defenders of the idea that fossils represent the remains of once living beings. His reason was simple: there is no other adequate explanation. Nevertheless, he had to argue the point with colleagues in the Royal Society who defended the idea of a “plastic virtue” in the earth that could produce fossils (Rudwick 1985:53–56, Rapport 1997:106). His claims about fossils were based on observations going back to his boyhood on the fossil-rich Isle of Wight. He was especially fascinated by what he called “snail-stones” or “snake-stones,” now called ammonites.

Robert Hooke was active in the Royal Society for 40 years, during its golden age. His own most important contributions came in his earlier years in the Society, when the standards and traditions of modern science were developing. After his death, Sir Isaac Newton became president of the Royal Society, yet in the 1700s the Society mostly continued along the paths blazed in the later 1600s. The loss of Hooke’s portrait contributed to his being overshadowed by Newton. Some historians have wondered if Newton permitted it to disappear when the Royal Society moved from Gresham College after Hooke’s death. Lisa Jardine has a different answer to the mystery: a picture clearly mislabeled “John Ray” is the long-lost portrait of Hooke (Jardine 2004:17).

Literature cited
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     Bennett, J., M. Cooper, M. Hunter, and L. Jardine. 2003. London’s Leonardo—the life and work of Robert Hooke. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
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Acknowledgments
For their assistance, I thank Anne-Marie Drouin-Hans, Université de Bourgogne, and Jean-Marc Drouin, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France.

Frank N. Egerton
Department of History
University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Kenosha WI 53141
E-mail: frank.egerton@uwp.edu