Walter, Herbert E.

Herbert Eugene Walter (1867-1945), was born in Burke, Vermont, on April 19, 1867. He studied at Lyndon Institute and graduated from Bates College in 1892. In the summer of 1892 he studied at the Marine Biological Laboratories at Woods Hole, where he came under the influence of Hermon Carey Bumpus, who brought him to Brown. After receiving his M. A. degree from Brown in 1893, he studied for a year at the University of Freiburg. He taught high school biology in Chicago from 1894 to 1904. His first book, Studies in Animal Life, published in 1901, introduced the study of bird life into the Chicago schools. With his wife, Alice Hall Lyndon, he wrote Wild Birds in City Parks, which went through many editions. He received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1906 and came to Brown as assistant professor of biology. He was promoted to associate professor in 1913 and professor in 1923. Two of his books, Genetics and The Human Skeleton were published in 1913. In 1923 his Biology of the Vertebrates, which was used in universities nationwide, was published. For five summers he was director of research for the Federal Bureau of Fisheries at Woods Hole, and for 23 summers he conducted a course in field zoology for teachers of biology at the Marine Biological Institute of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. He was assistant director of the Institute from 1917 to 1926. After retirement in 1937 he devoted time to revising his textbooks. He died suddenly on October 1, 1945. The memorial minute of the faculty said of him:

“Many of Dr. Walter’s personal characteristics were deep rooted in the cultural traditions and homely virtues that prevailed in the section of rural Vermont where he and generations of his forebears were born and reared. He was fundamentally a good neighbor in the Scriptural sense of that word, sensitive to the fortunes and misfortunes of friends and strangers, sympathetic and ready to help, but never intrusive. ... He was ‘soft-spoken’ but direct and unequivocal, singularly averse to dispute or argument even over points of scientific fact of interpretation. His droll and soul-saving humor never deserted him.”