Information compiled by Carol Ann McCormick,
November 2005.
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 adn 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. Enghusiastic 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 writier, not only on
this group, but on various other plants, on taxonomic problems
in general, and on botanical history. Comlete 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 Naturay
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 fromt he 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 aproaching 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.
