Biography

American botanist and linguist. Harley Harris Bartlett was an expert in tropical botany and an authority on Batak language and culture who was based at the University of Michigan from 1915 until 1956. He was born in rural Montana, but moved with his family to Indiana when he was 13. Before entering Harvard University in 1904, he worked at his former high school in Indianapolis for two years as a teacher's assistant in botany and chemistry.

Although Bartlett majored in chemistry at Harvard and received little formal training in botany, he spent three years at the Gray Herbarium as an undergraduate assistant to B.L. Robinson and M.L. Fernald, who assigned him the genus Juncus for the 7th edition of Gray's Manual (1908), and published his first ten papers on botanical topics, including one co-authored with Robinson. After receiving his AB degree in 1908, he turned down an offer to continue at Harvard in chemistry in favour of a position as a chemical biologist in the Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture. Although he was officially employed to work in the field of plant nutrition, his first publication for the Bureau was, in fact, on the taxonomy of Dioscorea, and the bulk of his research, inspired by the work of the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries, was on the genetics of Oenothera. Bartlett eventually described more than 45 taxa in the genus. He also studied the genetic control of plant pigments.

In 1915, Bartlett joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he eventually became full professor (1921), head of the botany department (1922-1947), and director of the botanical garden (1919-1955). His interest in plant biochemistry and the genetics of Oenothera continued but he also began to travel widely in the tropical regions of Asia and the Americas. He made his first collecting trip abroad in 1918 when he was sent as a botanist to Sumatra to research high-yielding rubber sources for the United States Rubber Company. It was during a stay in Sumatra, and on a later visit in 1927, that he developed his lifelong interest in the culture and language of the Batak, which led him into the fields of ethnobotany and linguistics. Bartlett undertook an exchange professorship at the University of the Philipines in the academic year 1934-1935 and later, during the reconstruction that followed the Second World War, he continued this association as a visiting professor. In addition he served as a special advisor to the president of the university and an educational consultant for the Philipines in the United States. He was also chair of the Commission on the Philipines for the National Research Council.

During the Second World War, while working as principal botanist for the United States Office of Rubber Plant Investigations, Bartlett built up a large and extensive collection of specimens in his free time, even though he was unable to carry field equipment with him and had only whatever newspaper he could procure and the mattress of his bed to make pressings. His official task meanwhile was to introduce high-yielding rubber plants from the Philipines into Haiti and to encourage the cultivation of Mexican guayule in parts of South America.

Bartlett was the author of 179 publications. Although most of these are scientific papers and reviews, many others are based on his ethnographic, ethnobotanical, and linguistic observations, particularly in Indonesia and the Philippines, and several are written on diverse topics in palaeobotany, education, philately, and botanical and general history. Before he died, he was working on a study of hybrid birches and on a bibliography of fire and primitive agriculture in the tropics. The herbarium at Michigan holds his original collections and approximately 60,000 specimens he acquired from resident collectors and other explorers in Asia and Australia.

Bartlett was a passionate bibliophile and bequeathed his botanical library, which includes rare pre-Linnean texts, to the university. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society from 1929, and served terms as secretary, vice president and president of the Botanical Society of America. The genus Bartlettina R.M. King & H. Rob. (Asteraceae) and many tropical species including Anemia bartlettii Mickel, Buxus bartlettii Standl., Rhipsalis bartlettii Clover and Panicum bartletii Swallen, all bear his name.

Sources:
E.G. Voss, 1961, "Harley Harris Bartlett", Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 88(1): 47-56.