Biography

American botanist whose life's work was the Flora of Peru later continued by M.O. Dillon and others at the Field Museum. J. Francis Macbride (as he preferred to be known) was born in Rock Valley, Iowa, and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Wyoming (1914) before working as an assistant at the Gray Herbarium, Harvard. He joined Chicago's Field Museum in 1921, which was just embarking on the epic Flora of Peru project. Macbride became the flora's chief architect. He is also remembered for creating the Field Museum's unique photographic type collection.

Soon after he joined the museum, the curator C.F. Millspaugh sent Macbride and an assistant, William Featherstone, to Peru. In 1922 the pair journeyed for a month from New York via the Panama Canal to Peru, where they collected in the highland regions of Lima, Junín, Huánuco and Pasco. After a second trip in 1923 (focusing on the Ucayali river in Huánaco), Macbride had amassed about 6,000 numbers and duplicates from Peru.

After beginning work on the Peruvian flora, his next major task was to travel to all the major European herbaria, over a period of ten years, to photograph type specimens that might be studied by botanists without the funds to travel themselves (arranging loans was far from a routine process at that time.) This project, initiated by Field curator B.E. Dahlgren, was at first funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and helped to lay the groundwork for the monumental Flora of Peru as Macbride gathered a great amount of Peruvian material in Europe. From 1929 to 1939, Macbride photographed 40,425 type and other historic specimens, representing nearly as many species, chiefly from South America. He first went to Berlin-Dahlem (B), which then housed the world's largest collection of neotropical types, and thereafter visited Copenhagen (C), Geneva (G, G-BOIS, G-DC and G-DEL), Hamburg (HBG), Hannover (HAN), Madrid (MA), Munich (M), Paris (P), and Vienna (W).

The photograph collection was immediately useful to American botanists, but acquired far greater importance following the destruction of parts of, and entire, European herbaria during Second World War bombing campaigns. For some species, the only known specimen is alone recorded among the Field's type photographs. Macbride was also able to arrange for the exchange of numerous Latin American specimens of collectors not well represented in other United States herbaria, for example Ruiz and Pavon, Pohl and Schott. During this decade, the Field Museum's collection of Peruvian plants grew to a tremendous 33,000 specimens, the largest such collection anywhere. The first volume of the Flora of Peru appeared in 1936 and over the next 25 years Macbride completed 150 treatments out of 180 families published. He adopted a concise style for the flora, not attempting to evaluate all species, but compiling all the necessary literature. He moved to California in the late 1940s, continuing to work on the opus and by the time he had published his last family treatment in 1960, there were only 20 remaining. The genus Macbrideina Standley is named after him as well as numerous species.

Sources:
Anon., 1976, "James Francis Macbride, 1892-1976", Madrono, 23: 456
W. E. Grimé and T. Plowman, 1987, "Type Photographs at the Field Museum of Natural History", Taxon, 36(2): 425
The Field Museum, Botany Herbarium:
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/research_collections/botany/collections_herbarium.htm
Life and Times of J. Francis Macbride:
http://www.sacha.org/macbr/intro.htm.