William Beebe

Biography

Early life and education

Charles William Beebe was born in Brooklyn, New York, son of the newspaper executive Charles Beebe. Although some sources have described him as an only child, he had a younger brother named John who died in infancy. Early in his life, his family moved to East Orange, New Jersey, where he began to acquire both his fascination with the natural world and his tendency to record everything he saw. The American Museum of Natural History, which opened the year that Beebe was born, fostered Beebe's love of nature and was an early influence on him.

In September 1891, Beebe began attending East Orange High School. Although Beebe did not formally drop his first name "Charles" until 1915, before attending high school he was already commonly known as "William Beebe", as he would be known from this point onward. During his high school years Beebe developed an interest in collecting animals, particularly after receiving his first gun at the age of sixteen, and trained himself in taxidermy to preserve them. When he was unable to collect a specimen for himself, he often obtained it from a supply house known as Lattin's, or by trading with other collectors. Beebe's first article was published while he was still in high school, a description of a bird called a brown creeper, which appeared in the January 1895 issue of the magazine Harper's Young People.

In 1896, Beebe was accepted with advanced placement to Columbia University. While attending university, Beebe frequently split his time between the university and the American Museum of Natural history, many of whose researchers were also professors at Columbia. At Columbia he studied under Henry Fairfield Osborn, and developed a close relationship with him which would endure until Osborn's death in 1935.

While attending Columbia, Beebe persuaded his professors to sponsor him and several fellow students taking research trips to Nova Scotia, where he continued his hobby of collecting, as well as attempting to photograph difficult-to-observe scenes of birds and other animals. Several of Beebe's photographs from these expeditions were purchased by Columbia professors to use as slides during their lectures. During these trips, Beebe also developed an interest in dredging, the practice of using nets to haul up animals that lived deep underwater and attempting to study them before they died or disintegrated. Beebe never applied to receive a degree from Columbia, although years later he was granted honorary doctorates from both Tufts and Colgate University.

Employment at the Bronx Zoo

In November 1897, Frank Chapman sponsored Beebe to become an associate member of the American Ornithologists' Union, and the following month Beebe gave his first professional lecture on ornithology to a society called Uncle Clarence's Bergen Point Culture Club. In 1899, although he had completed all of the required courses for a degree in science from Columbia except for mathematics, he decided to forgo his studies in favor of an invitation from Osborn to work at the New York Zoological Park which was about to open. Several factors contributed to this decision, including both excitement at being part of the zoo, and the sense that his studies were putting too much of a strain on his family's finances.

Osborn appointed Beebe to the position of assistant curator of ornithology. As assistant curator, one of his principal jobs was to breed and rear the zoo's birds in order to sustain their population. Beebe placed much importance on the birds being given as much space as possible, and proposed the building of a "flying cage" the size of a football field. This was eventually built, although at less than half the size that Beebe had originally requested. While Beebe's flying cage was criticized as being based on an inaccurate understanding of birds' needs, it ultimately proved very successful.

In 1901, Beebe returned to Nova Scotia on his first expedition for the zoo, intending to collect marine animals by searching tide pools and with additional dredging. The following year he was promoted from assistant curator to the rank of a full curator, a post he held until 1918. He then went on to serve as an honorary curator from 1919 to 1962.

On August 6, 1902, Beebe was married to Mary Blair Rice, better known by her pen name Blair Niles. Blair subsequently accompanied Beebe on several of his expeditions, and as a writer herself, frequently assisted Beebe with his own writing. Beebe and Blair regarded their honeymoon, another trip to Nova Scotia, as a further opportunity for collecting.

The following February, Beebe, and Blair went on an expedition to the Florida Keys, because Beebe was suffering from a throat infection and the zoo believed that the warm climate would be beneficial to his health. This expedition was Beebe's introduction to the tropics, with which he developed a long-standing fascination. In July 1903, at the request of a lawyer named Louis Whealton whom the zoo's director William Temple Hornaday regarded as a potential donor to the zoo, Beebe and Blair went on another expedition to Virginia's Barrier Islands. Although it was intended as an expedition for the zoo, Beebe described it as "our third honeymoon this year".

Early exploration and expeditions

In December 1903, to avert another bout of Beebe's throat ailment, Hornaday sent him on an expedition to Mexico which would last until the following April. Since Mexico was still largely unstable at this point, he and Blair traveled on horseback and lived mostly in tents, and both carried revolvers for self-protection. Although the purpose of the expedition was to discover, identify and collect Mexico's birds, it has also been described as yet another honeymoon between him and Blair. Beebe's first book, titled Two Bird Lovers in Mexico, was an account of this expedition. The last chapter was written by Blair and was an explanation of how to plan and execute a vacation in the wilderness. The book was enthusiastically well received.

Beebe's second book, The Bird, Its Form and Function, was published in 1906. This book was a reworking of a manuscript that Beebe had submitted to Henry Holt in 1902, but which Holt had asked him to expand into a major work on birds. In its finished form it represented a new kind of nature writing in that, although it presented technical information about bird biology and evolution, it did so in a way meant to be accessible to a general audience. It also represented an important turning point for Beebe, because in contrast to his youthful fascination with adding animals to his collection, in this book he was beginning to emphasize the importance of wildlife conservation. Regarding the killing of animals for the sole purpose of collecting, the book states:

And the next time you raise your gun to needlessly take a feathered life, think of the marvelous little engine which your lead will stifle forever; lower your weapon and look into the clear bright eyes of the bird whose body equals yours in physical perfection, and whose tiny brain can generate a sympathy, a love for its mate, which is sincerity and unselfishness suffers little when compared with human affection.

Although Beebe continued to shoot animals when it was necessary for examining them scientifically, he no longer regarded adding to a collection as a valid reason to take a life. In 1906 Beebe presented his own collection, which had grown to 990 specimens during his earlier years as a collector, as a gift to the zoo for educational and research purposes. For this gift, he was made a life member of the New York Zoological Society. The same year, he was also elected a fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences.

The pheasant expedition

In December 1909, businessman and philanthropist Anthony R. Kuser proposed to the zoo that Beebe be allowed to go on a voyage around the world to document the world's pheasants, which would be financed by Kuser. Hornaday strongly objected to this proposal, describing Kuser as an "evil genius" who was attempting to steal Beebe away from his duties at the zoo. However, the zoo ultimately decided in Kuser's favor, partly because the scientific papers produced by Beebe's trip to Guiana had been beneficial to the zoo's reputation. Hornaday appointed Crandall as the zoo's acting curator of birds, giving him the duty of caring for its birds in Beebe's absence. Beebe and Blair left for their expedition accompanied by Robert Bruce Horsfall, whose job would be to provide illustrations of the birds for the book that would hopefully result from this expedition.

After crossing the Atlantic Ocean on the RMS Lusitania to London, where they gathered the supplies they would need for their expedition, Beebe and his team traveled across the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt, through the Suez Canal, and across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon, where they began their task of documenting the native wildfowl. From Ceylon they traveled to Calcutta, with the goal of capturing the species of pheasants which live only in the Himalayas. By this point Beebe was beginning to conflict with Horsfall, who was unaccustomed to such expeditions. After Beebe had finished his documentation in the eastern part of the range, Horsfall refused to accompany Beebe in the western part of the range, causing Beebe to leave him in the town of Jorepokhri and continue his work in the Western Himalayas without him. Horsfall rejoined them in Calcutta, from which they sailed to Indonesia. The next ship took them to Singapore, where Beebe established a base of operations for the next stage of his expedition.

The expedition's next destination was Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. By the time they left Sarawak, the conflict between Beebe and Horsfall had grown to such a degree that Beebe decided Horsfall was endangering the expedition and must be sent home. In response to Beebe's dismissal, Horsfall retorted that he had been ill-treated by Beebe from the beginning of the expedition and that his subsequent actions had been for the express purpose of revenge. Continuing without Horsfall, Beebe and Blair traveled to Batavia in Java, to the island of Madura just to the north, and to Belitung between Borneo and Sumatra.

Finished in Java, Beebe and his crew sailed north from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur to begin exploring Malaya. After Malaya, the next portion of their expedition took them to Burma, where they arrived in Rangoon and traveled by rail to Myitkyina. In Burma Beebe succumbed temporarily to a bout of depression, and it was several days before he was able to resume working or continue the expedition. He attributed his recovery to the pile of penny dreadful novels he discovered in his bungalow at Pungatong, which he then read constantly for the next few days.

Return to Guiana and World War I

Beebe undertook an expedition to Brazil in 1915, to capture more birds for the zoo. This expedition was an important turning point for Beebe in several ways. Beebe had far more field experience than either of the two others accompanying him on the expedition, G. Inness Hartley and Herbert Atkins, making this his introduction to the role of a mentor. During this expedition, Beebe was also amazed to discover the number and variety of organisms living under a single tree and pioneered the method of studying a small area of wilderness for an extended amount of time. This expedition marked the beginning of a shift for Beebe from ornithology to the study of tropical ecosystems.

In 1916, Beebe traveled to Georgetown in pursuit of his earlier goal of establishing a permanent field research station in Guiana. After following several leads which came to nothing, his goal was realized when George Withers, who owned a rubber plantation on the Mazaruni River, offered him the use of a large house on his property for this purpose. Soon after Beebe and his researchers moved into the plantation house, which was known by the name of Kalacoon, they were paid a visit by Theodore Roosevelt and his family. Roosevelt subsequently wrote an article about the station for Scribner's Magazine, which helped to build public support for the station.

The establishment of the Kalacoon research station enabled Beebe to research the ecology of the surrounding jungle in far more detail than had been possible during his earlier expeditions. Using Kalacoon as his base of operations, Beebe performed a novel type of study: methodically dissecting a small area of jungle, and all of the animals which inhabit it, from the top of the canopy to below the ground. In a second study, Beebe performed the same task for a much larger area of jungle, approximately a quarter-mile (0.4 km) square. During his first season at Kalacoon in 1916, Beebe brought back 300 living specimens for the zoo. This time he succeeded at capturing a hoatzin, the bird that he had narrowly missed during his earlier trip to Guiana, although he was unable to keep it alive for the zoo during the trip back to New York.

Beebe summarized his discoveries at Kalacoon in his 1917 book Tropical Wild Life in British Guiana, which inspired many other researchers to plan trips to Kalacoon or to establish their own field research stations of the type that Beebe had pioneered.

Galápagos expeditions

Beebe was eager to undertake an expedition to the Galápagos Islands, intending to obtain more detailed data in support of evolution than Charles Darwin had been able to collect in his earlier visit. In 1923, Harrison Williams agreed to finance such an expedition, and Beebe was provided with a 250-foot (76 m) steam yacht called the Noma for this purpose along with a support crew. The support crew included several scientists who had worked with Beebe previously and several artists including the marine painter Harry Hoffman, as well as some of Williams' friends whose inclusion was a condition for Williams' agreement to fund the expedition. Passing through the Sargasso Sea on the way to the Galápagos, Beebe was fascinated by the diversity of life that could be found in the sargassum weed floating on the surface and spent several days scooping the weed from the water to examine the creatures that lived in it.

Beebe's first expedition to the Galápagos lasted twenty days, broken into two ten-day periods, between which the Noma was forced to return to Panama for fresh water and coal. During this expedition he documented the unique ways that animals that inhabit the Galápagos have evolved in response to the absence of predators. The Galápagos animals generally showed no fear of humans, causing the team to have a high degree of success at capturing live specimens for the zoo. Beebe also discovered a previously unknown bay on Genovesa Island (also known as Tower Island) in the Galápagos, which he named Darwin Bay, and documented the diversity of animal life that inhabited it. During the return to New York from this expedition, Beebe continued to dredge animals from the sea, using a pair of new devices he had devised to assist himself with this: a "pulpit", an iron cage affixed to the bow of the ship that enabled its occupant to examine the surface of the sea more closely; and a "boom walk", a 30-foot (9.1 m) boom jutting from the side of the ship from which he suspended himself. The book in which Beebe summarized this expedition, titled Galápagos: World's End, was an instant best-seller and remained on the New York Times top ten list for several months.

In 1924, Beebe went on another expedition to his Guiana research station of Kartabo, intending to continue the detailed documentation of the tropical ecosystem that he had begun at Kalacoon. The paper which finally resulted from this study was published in Zoologica in 1925 and was the first study of its kind in the developing field of tropical ecology. Beebe continued to battle depression during this trip to Kartabo, both over his earlier loss of Blair, and over the death of his mother Nettie, who had died shortly before the beginning of the expedition.

Haiti and Bermuda

In 1927, Beebe went on an expedition to Haiti to document its marine life. Anchoring his ship the Lieutenant in the harbor of Port-au-Prince, he performed over 300 helmet dives examining the area's coral reefs and classifying the fish that inhabited them. These dives involved several technological innovations: a watertight brass box which could be used to house a camera for underwater photography, and a telephone which was incorporated into the diving helmet, allowing the diver to dictate observations to someone on the surface instead of having to take notes underwater. Within a hundred days, Beebe and his team had created a catalog of species inhabiting the area nearly as long as what had been assembled on the neighboring island of Puerto Rico in the past four hundred years. In 1928 Beebe and Tee-Van published an illustrated and annotated list of 270 such species, which was expanded in 1935 bringing the total to 324. Beebe provided an account of this expedition in his 1928 book Beneath Tropic Seas, which was the first of his books to receive less than enthusiastic reviews, due to its episodic structure.

As he gained experience with helmet diving, Beebe soon became an enthusiastic advocate of it, believing it to be something that should be experienced by everyone who had the opportunity to do so. He later went so far as to suggest that beachfront homes would someday contain their own underwater gardens, to be experienced with the help of diving helmets:

If you wish to make a garden, choose some beautiful slope or reef grotto and with a hatchet chop and pry off coral boulders with waving purple sea-plumes and golden sea-fans and great particolored anemones. Wedge these into crevices, and in a few days, you will have a sunken garden in a new and miraculous sense. As birds collect about the luxuriant growths of a garden in the upper air, so hosts of fish will follow your labors, great crabs and starfish will creep thither, and now and then fairy jellyfish will throb past, superior in beauty to anything in the upper world, more delicate and graceful than any butterfly.

By this point in his life Beebe was developing a close friendship with Helen Ricker, an American romance novelist who went by the pen name of Elswyth Thane, who had met Beebe in 1925. Very little of their early correspondence survives, but Elswyth had idolized Beebe for years, and her first novel Riders of the Wind was devoted to him. The novel was an account of a young woman who falls in love with and eventually marries, a much older adventurer who strongly resembled Beebe. Beebe and Elswyth were married on September 22, 1927, when Beebe was 50. Due to Elswyth's tendency to misrepresent her age, conflicting accounts exist of how old she was when she and Beebe were married, ranging from 23 to 28. Elswyth and Beebe had an open marriage, in which neither expected sexual exclusivity from the other so long as their life together was not damaged.

Work at Nonsuch Island

From 1930 to 1934, Beebe and Barton used the Bathysphere to conduct a series of dives of increasing depth off the coast of Nonsuch Island, becoming the first people to observe deep-sea animals in their native environment. The Bathysphere was lowered into the ocean using a steel cable, and a second cable carried a phone line which the Bathysphere's occupants used to communicate with the surface, as well as an electrical cable for a searchlight to illuminate animals outside the Bathysphere. Beebe's observations were relayed up the phone line to be recorded by Gloria Hollister, his chief technical associate who was also in charge of preparing specimens obtained from dredging. Beebe and Barton made a total of 35 dives in the Bathysphere, setting several consecutive world records for the deepest dive ever performed by a human. The record set by the deepest of these, to a depth of 3,028 feet (923 m) on August 15, 1934, lasted until it was broken by Barton in 1949.

In 1931, Beebe and Barton's Bathysphere dives were interrupted for a year due to technical problems and uncooperative weather. An additional difficulty in 1931 was the death of Beebe's father, and Beebe left Nonsuch Island for a week to attend his father's funeral. A second year-long interruption occurred in 1933, and was caused in part by a lack of funds due to the Great Depression. Although Beebe and Barton performed no dives in 1933, their work gathered a large amount of publicity when the Bathysphere was displayed in a special exhibit for the American Museum of Natural History, and later at the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago, where they shared the fair's Hall of Science with Auguste Piccard. Beebe and Barton also obtained publicity for their dives from several articles Beebe wrote describing them for National Geographic, and from an NBC radio broadcast in which Beebe's voice transmitted up the phone line from inside the Bathysphere was broadcast nationally over the radio.

Although Beebe attempted to ensure that Barton would receive credit as the Bathysphere's inventor and Beebe's fellow diver, the popular media tended to ignore Barton and pay attention only to Beebe. Barton was often resentful of this, believing Beebe to be deliberately hogging the fame. Beebe in turn lacked patience for Barton's unpredictable moods and felt that Barton did not display the proper respect for the natural world. Still, Beebe and Barton both had something the other needed: Beebe for his experience as a marine biologist and Barton for his mechanical skill. Out of pragmatic concern for the success of their lives, they managed to resolve their disagreements well enough to work together at Nonsuch Island, although they did not remain on good terms afterward.

Return to the tropics

Although Beebe continued to use Nonsuch Island as his base of operations throughout the 1930s, with the onset of World War II in 1939 it was announced that the ferry linking Bermuda to New York would soon be making its final run, requiring Beebe and his team to hastily abandon their station there. Transportation to and from Bermuda resumed in 1940, and Beebe returned there in May 1941, but the environment was slowly being transformed due to the war. A large number of military ships made docking difficult, most of the island's reefs were being destroyed to construct an airfield, and the combination of construction activity and pollution made observing the sea life impossible. Appalled by the destruction, Beebe finally rented his station at Nonsuch Island to a military contractor and returned to New York.

With the loss of their station in Bermuda, Beebe and Elswyth gave up on their compromise of finding a research station where they could both be happy. Elswyth, who was most content in temperate environments, began searching for a home in New England where she could continue her writing. Meanwhile, Beebe began searching for a new tropical research station to replace Kartabo, which had fallen victim to deforestation just like Kalacoon before it. Beebe eventually helped Elswyth purchase a small farm near Wilmington, Vermont, where he visited her frequently. Elswyth explained in a magazine interview that she was uncomfortable on Beebe's expeditions, so the two of them had agreed that they would keep their careers separate from their private lives.

With the financial assistance of Standard Oil and the Guggenheim Foundation, Beebe established his next research station in Caripito, a small city in Venezuela around 100 miles (160 km) west of Trinidad and Tobago. Beebe and his team used this station to study the ecology of the region and recorded how its inhabitants were affected by its cycle of wet and dry seasons. One important study which resulted from this region was the first documentation of rhinoceros beetles using their horns in competition between males, proving that their horns were an adaptation for sexual selection rather than for defense against predators. Although Beebe's research at Caripito was productive, he felt that the extremity of its wet-dry cycle made it impractical as a research station, and the expanding oil operations in the region were in danger of destroying the local environment. For these reasons, Beebe did not return to Caripito after his first season there.

In the spring of 1944, Jocelyn Crane returned to Venezuela to search for a location for a new field station to replace the one at Caripito. The location that she found, known as Rancho Grande, had initially been intended as a palace for Venezuela's dictator Juan Vicente Gómez in the Henri Pittier National Park. The palace's construction had been left unfinished after Gómez's death, and since then the building's vast corridors and ballrooms had become the home of jaguars, tapirs and sloths. Unlike Beebe's other tropical research stations, which had been located in lowland regions, Rancho Grande was located on a mountainside in what Beebe described as "the ultimate cloud jungle". Creole Petroleum, a Venezuelan spin-off of Standard, agreed to cover the cost of the station and finished a small portion of the vast structure for Beebe and his team to use. Beebe and his team began work there in 1945, staying as guests of the Venezuelan government.

Final years in Trinidad and Tobago

The product of Jocelyn Crane's search for a potential research station in Trinidad and Tobago was a house on a hill overlooking the Arima Valley, which was known as Verdant Vale. In 1949, Beebe bought this estate to use a permanent research station to replace Rancho Grande. Beebe renamed the estate Simla, after the hill in India that featured in Rudyard Kipling's writings. He later described the sense of destiny that marked his introduction to the estate:

We had climbed the winding road in a tropical downpour. As we came out below the outermost wall, the sun broke through, three house wrens sang at once, and a double rainbow sprayed the valley with infrared and ultraviolet. We would not have been human if we had refused to recognize omens.

At Simla Beebe and his team worked closely together with Asa and Newcome Wright, the owners of the adjacent Spring Hill estate, who provided accommodations for them while water and electricity were connected at Simla. Although the initial purchase of Simla had contained only the house and 22 acres (0.089 km2) of the forest surrounding it, Beebe soon realized that this was insufficient for the research he wished to conduct, and purchased another neighboring estate known as St. Pat's which contained an additional 170 acres (0.69 km2). In 1953, Beebe donated both properties to the New York Zoological Society for one dollar, giving him the position of one of the society's "Benefactors in Perpetuity".

Research at Simla formally began in 1950. Beebe's research at Simla combined elements of many different earlier stages of his research, including observations of the life cycles of the area's birds, detailed analyses of every plant and animal in small areas of forest, and studies of insect behavior. Insects were the focus of the scientific papers he produced during this period, marking a transition from his past areas of study into the field of entomology. Local children periodically brought animal specimens to Beebe at Simla and asked him to classify them. Remembering the early studies of his own childhood, in which he had brought specimens to the American Museum of Natural History, he was happily working with them.

In 1952, on his seventy-fifth birthday, Beebe retired from his position as the director of the NYZS's Department of Zoological Society and became Director Emeritus, while Jocelyn Crane was promoted to Assistant Director. In honor of his lifetime of work as a naturalist, Beebe was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal in 1953. Beebe's last major expedition occurred in 1955, retracing the route he had taken during his pheasant expedition 45 years earlier, with the intention of discovering how the populations he had previously studied were faring in response to human encroachment. Jocelyn accompanied him on this expedition for the purpose of documenting Asia's fiddler crabs. Although Jocelyn's studies during this expedition served as part of the basis for her monograph Fiddler Crabs of the World, Beebe never published the results of his own observations during it.

Personality and cultural image

William Beebe was more famous in the United States than any other American naturalist before the days of television. As a scientific writer who participated in both the popular and academic worlds, he occupied a similar role to the role later occupied by Stephen Jay Gould. Beebe was a well-known figure in the Roaring Twenties of New York City and was friends with numerous other well-known figures of the period, including Fannie Hurst and the cartoonist Rube Goldberg. Although he was not physically handsome in the traditional sense, he tended to dominate every social and professional situation due to his enthusiasm, intelligence, and charisma. As a result of his much-publicized divorce from Blair and his later marriage to Elswyth, he was also known for his stormy relationships with women.

Beebe described his religious beliefs as a combination of Presbyterianism and Buddhism. His religion was largely the result of seeking to combine his sense of awe and wonder at the natural world with a scientific understanding of its workings. He was highly critical of efforts to use science to justify political ideologies, such as socialism or the belief that women were inferior to men. Beebe also disapproved of the eugenic ideas advocated by many biologists in the early 20th century, including some of his contemporaries at the zoo, although this was largely out of fear that these ideas would alienate friends of the zoo and cause divisions among its staff.

Beebe had a troubled relationship with some of his superiors at the zoo, particularly Hornaday, who was resentful of Beebe's constant demands for more funding and staff, as well as the fact that as Beebe's career progressed he gradually devoted less and less time to care for the zoo itself. One particular point of disagreement was Beebe's forgetfulness about returning books which he had borrowed from the Zoological Society's Library, which would occasionally go missing for years as a result. However, Hornaday never publicly expressed his disagreements with Beebe and did not hesitate to defend Beebe's work when others criticized it.

Beebe had high expectations of the people working under him on all of his expeditions, although he never revealed the exact characteristics that he looked for in potential employees. Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr. recounts one incident in which Beebe turned down a scientist who wished to work with him when the scientist described boredom with his current duties as one of his reasons for requesting this. In response to this request, Beebe retorted:

Impact of work and legacy

William Beebe was a pioneer in the field now known as ecology. His theory that organisms must be understood in the context of the ecosystems they inhabit was completely new for its time and has been highly influential. The method he invented of methodically analyzing all organisms within a small area of wilderness has become a standard method in this field. Beebe was also a pioneer in the field of oceanography, setting a precedent with his Bathysphere dives which many other researchers would follow.

E. O. Wilson, Sylvia Earle and Ernst Mayr have all described Beebe's work as an influence on their own choice of careers. Among the most significant of Beebe's influences on other researchers was Rachel Carson, who regarded Beebe as both a friend and an inspiration. Carson dedicated her 1951 book The Sea Around Us to Beebe, writing "My absorption in the mystery and meaning of the sea have been stimulated and the writing of this book aided by the friendship and encouragement of William Beebe." Due to Beebe's renewed emphasis on field research at a time when laboratory studies were becoming the dominant trend in biology, more recent field researchers such as Jane Goodall and George Schaller are also sometimes considered his intellectual descendants.

By writing for a scientific as well as the popular audience, Beebe did much to make science accessible to the general public. This was particularly significant in the area of conservation, of which he was one of the most important early advocates. With his many writings about the dangers of environmental destruction, Beebe helped to raise public awareness about this topic. However, Beebe's prolific writing for a popular audience had a downside, in that other scientists of his time were reluctant to hold him in high accord because they regarded him as a popularizer.

During the course of his career, Beebe authored over 800 articles and 21 books, including his four-volume pheasant monograph. He had a total of 64 animals named after him, and he described one new species of bird and 87 species of fish (see Category:Taxa named by William Beebe). While 83 of the fish that he described were done so in a conventional manner, the remaining four were done so based on visual observations.

A lingering controversy exists in ichthyology over the validity of the four species Beebe described based on visual descriptions only, which he had observed during his Bathysphere dives. The naming of a new species ordinarily requires obtaining and analyzing a type specimen, something which was obviously impossible from inside the Bathysphere. Some of Beebe's critics claimed that these fish were illusions resulting from condensation on the Bathysphere's window, or even that Beebe willfully made them up, although the latter would have been strongly at odds with Beebe's reputation as an honest and rigorous scientist. While many of Beebe's observations from the Bathysphere have since been confirmed by advances in undersea photography, it is unclear whether others fit the description of any known sea animal. One possibility is that although these animals indeed exist, so much remains to be discovered about life in the deep ocean that these animals have yet to be seen by anyone other than him.

Tetrapteryx

Along with his analysis of pheasant phylogeny and his studies of life in the Galápagos Islands, Beebe regarded one of his most important contributions to the field of evolutionary biology to be his hypothesis that the ancestors of birds passed through what he referred to as a “Tetrapteryx stage”, with wings on both their front and hind limbs. Beebe based this theory on his observation that the hatchlings and embryos of some modern birds possess long quill feathers on their legs, which he regarded as an atavism; he also noticed vestiges of leg-wings on one of the specimens of Archaeopteryx. Beebe described his idea in a 1915 paper published in Zoologica, titled "A Tetrapteryx Stage in the Ancestry of Birds".

Gerhard Heilmann discussed Beebe's Tetrapteryx hypothesis at considerable length in his 1926 book The Origin of Birds. Heilmann examined hatchlings of many other bird species, both closely related to those studied by Beebe and belonging to more primitive species, in hope of finding additional evidence for the leg-wings which Beebe had documented. After failing to find such evidence, Heilmann ultimately rejected Beebe's Tetrapteryx hypothesis, and this remained the consensus among ornithologists for the next several decades. Beebe, however, continued to advance his Tetrapteryx hypothesis as late as the 1940s.

In 2003, Beebe's Tetrapteryx hypothesis was supported by the discovery of Microraptor gui, a small feathered dinosaur which possessed asymmetrical flight feathers on both its front and hind limbs. Beebe's Tetrapteryx hypothesis is now regarded as prescient for its prediction of both the anatomy and likely gliding posture of Microraptor gui, which Richard O. Prum has described as "[looking] as if it could have glided straight out of the pages of Beebe’s notebooks." This animal's discovery has had the effect of resurrecting Beebe's theory that leg feathers played an important role in the origin of bird flight.

William Beebe Tropical Research Station

Following William Beebe's death in 1962, his research station at Simla remained in operation under Jocelyn Crane's management, under the new name of the William Beebe Tropical Research Station. However, because Jocelyn's research required her to travel north for extended periods, by 1965 she had little time to keep the station running. By 1971, the station had fallen into disuse and was declared closed. Meanwhile, as Asa Wright's health began to fail in her old age, her friends began to fear that after her death her neighboring estate of Spring Hill might be lost to developers and established a trust to buy the estate and convert it into the Asa Wright nature center. In 1974, Beebe's property was donated to the newly established Asa Wright Nature Center.

Now under the management of the Asa Wright Nature Center, the William Beebe Tropical Research Station has gradually been renovated. It is now once again actively involved in research and an important gathering place for scientists. It is also a popular destination for birdwatchers, who can observe the same populations of hummingbirds, tanagers and oilbirds that William Beebe studied decades earlier.