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Home > About the Academy > Biographical memoirs
BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
Martin Fritz Glaessner 1906-1989
By Brian McGowran
This memoir was originally published in Historical Records of Australian Science, vol.10, no.1, 1994.
Numbers in brackets refer to the references at the end of the text.
Early years and education
Martin Glaessner was
born on Christmas Day 1906 in Aussig, an old city on the River
Elbe in northwestern Bohemia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
(Aussig is now Usti nad Lebem in the Czech Republic). His father
was Dr Arthur Glaessner (1878-1928), a chemical engineer and industrialist
in the fields of ceramics and glass, later in pharmacology, and
prominent in Vienna's science-technology community. His mother
was Mrs Luise Glaessner whom late in life he brought out to Melbourne.
Martin was an only child and, indeed, the only child of a part-Jewish
(on his father's side) extended family. Displaying some promise
at an early age in a family that took matters cultural and intellectual
very seriously, he heightened family expectations of achievement
which, as he recalled, were not always easy to carry. Certainly
he developed the essentials for the scholarly life very early:
a capacity for hard and sustained work, the ability to read very
quickly and widely, the habit of rigorous and critical scrutiny.
He remained a voracious reader to the very end of his life and
in several languages. To his native German with some Czech he
would add in due course English, Russian and French, plus some
understanding of other European languages. Culturally well-rounded
in the Viennese style, he became a good pianist but rarely played
when he could no longer maintain his former standards.
His education and professional training took place in the Vienna
of the so-called golden autumn times of an extraordinarily rich
and turbulent mix of all the arts and the sciences at the end
of the Hapsburg dynasty (he remembered seeing the Emperor Franz
Josef on parade). An interest in natural history emerged (he claimed)
not from his broad education so much as from being so bored whilst
playing the obligatory football that he paid more attention to
the interesting-looking fossil shells eroding out of the pitch
under his scuffing boots than to his obligations to the team.
At any rate he was thoroughly committed to natural history by
the time he entered the University of Vienna in 1925. However,
his family insisted that his fascination with fossils and natural
history had to be supported by something more potentially remunerative,
such as the law. This was nothing new the young Charles Lyell
studied law a century before while even earlier, J.S. Bach did
not want his sons as musicians to be treated like servants and
so C.P.E. studied law. Instead of merely studying law, Glaessner
achieved two doctorates within six years of entering university,
one in law (1929) and the other in geology and palaeontology (1931).
(The Glaessners attended the half-century celebrations of the
award in Vienna in 1981.)
Palaeontology and historical geology in Vienna and London
Vienna stands at the Danubian watergap between the Alps and the
Carpathians a crucial position geologically and geographically
as well as in the history of Europe. The mountain ranges, thrown
up against the anvil of the Bohemian Massif to the north, contrast
with the downfaulted low-lands such as the Vienna Basin. Fossils
have always had a central role in advancing the geology of this
region, a role that was critical in stimulating the enthusiasms
and shaping the scientific directions of the young Martin Glaessner.
As tellers of geological time, fossils were essential for unravelling
the structural complexities of the mountain ranges and reconstructing
the succession of key events or turning points in the geological
history of the region. As recorders of ancient environments and
climates, fossils held the clues to the changing configurations
of the great central European seaway studied by the Austrian geologist
Eduard Suess in the later nineteenth century and now known as
Paratethys. In counterpoint to the marine fossil record, terrestrial
fossils recorded over land migrations by ancient horses and many
other animals between Asia, Europe and Africa. In his education
and early research, Glaessner developed a profound respect for
holistic palaeontology and geology and for the power of the fossil
record to reveal the history of life and organic evolution, the
history of the earth's crust, and concentrations of resources
such as petroleum and natural gas. He never lost that tripartite
balance between the development of his own tools (fossils and
strata), the very broad and eclectic approach needed in earth
and life history, and the comparable breadth required in economic
geology.
Already a Research Associate of the Museum of Natural History
in Vienna at the age of 16 (in 1923) and two years before university
and the law, Glaessner published three papers on crabs and their
geological context in the Vienna Basin before he was twenty. As
well as foreshadowing a major strand of his life's work, this
interest in crabs had another implication for the breadth of Glaessner's
vision. To a considerable extent, palaeontology in the German-speaking
lands developed independently of zoology (and even of palaeontology
elsewhere). Within palaeontology, there were the great fossil
groups such as the trilobites and the foraminifera that disentangled
geological complexity and built the geological time scale these
were in the hands of stratigraphically-oriented specialists who
tended to avoid arcane palaeobiological theorizing. And then there
were fossil groups with living members well known to zoology,
such as crabs, turtles and apes, all published on by Glaessner
in the Vienna years less obviously significant as tools of geological
time but incorporated into the research programmes of the palaeobiologists.
In ignoring that cultural divide, Glaessner became as familiar
with the biological traditions of morphology, taxonomy and organic
evolution as he did with Alpine tectonics or petroleum exploration.
By 1930, at the age of 23, he had published Crustacea Decapoda
and another major work on that group with Karl Beurlen (to
whom I return below). And a propos of the Germanic isolation alluded
to, Glaessner was invited due no doubt to the respect engendered
by his crustacean research to spend 1930-31 as a Research Associate
at the British Museum (Natural History) in London. The respect
became mutual: his London experiences gave him a lasting and deep
respect for British palaeontology.
Moscow and micropalaeontology
By the age of about 26, Glaessner had achieved as well as his
doctorates a monograph on crabs and twenty-odd papers on diverse
subjects. He had made an impact in the three major divisions of
palaeontology, namely invertebrate, vertebrate and micro-palaeontology,
as well as in stratigraphy and tectonic geology. He would let
none of these fields slip in the decades to come but would keep
adding to them. The holistic approach, the grand view nourished
by the interplay between diverse active interests, already were
becoming apparent.
At this point he was invited by the Director, State Petroleum
Research Institute, USSR, 'to organize research work in micro-palaeontology,
for the purpose of correlation of the zones and strata of the
oilfields'. Having accepted the offer and moved to Moscow, and
clearly successful in the task, he was asked two years later by
Professor I.M. Gubkin to organize a micropalaeontological laboratory
at the new Institute of Mineral Fuels (meaning petroleum and natural
gas) in Moscow. In that position he was a Senior Research Officer
of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The laboratories were
in Moscow, fieldwork was in the Crimea and the mountains of the
Caucasus.
What has micropalaeontology to do with crabs and turtles? Micropalaeontology
is the study of microfossils such as the mineralized skeletons
of single-celled eucaryotes and very small animals. Their first
attraction is that thousands of specimens per small sediment sample
can be recovered from drilling drilling beneath the land or
shallow seas and more recently beneath the deep oceans. Their
second attraction is that several groups of organisms had a high
rate of speciation and extinction, thus delivering evolutionary
events to mark the passage of geological time in small increments.
Again, they are environmentally sensitive and community changes
record subtle changes in environment, such as the global alternations
between the icehouse and the greenhouse state. The microfossil
group with the longest history of active research is the foraminifera,
which are marine protozoans with the best overall fossil record
of all organisms. Fossil foraminifera were being curated in museum
collections and monographed in Vienna as long ago as the late
eighteenth century, but it was decades before they were employed
in the analysis of strata in the search for water and petroleum
(in the Hapsburg Empire, as it happened); and credit for the first
publication to bring applied micropalaeontology to the forefront
in petroleum exploration and development is given to a study in
the Gulf Coast in the United States as late as 1925. Glaessner
had realized their importance in sorting out the record of deformed
strata in the Vienna Basin. I suspect, though, that the main factor
in his appointment to Moscow was his outstanding talent for seeing
and pursuing the implications of his specialized palaeontological
expertise. Certainly that talent was more highly developed than
in virtually all other micropalaeontologists until the rise of
the discipline of palaeoceanography, decades later. It was apparent
from the beginning that this student had all the attributes to
write high-quality taxonomic monographs but was too intellectually
restless to spend his career doing only that. He was never going
to be merely the expert in taxonomic esoterica and biostratigraphic
age determinations, supplying grist to the mills of the generalist-synthesizers.
Most foraminifera live on and in the muds at the bottom of the
sea. One of their evolutionary strategies, repeated many times,
has been to grow large (to millimeters and even centimeters in
size; remember that these are protozoans!) and to cultivate phytosymbionts.
Another extremely successful strategy was to invade the open oceans
as plankton (where phytosymbiosis was invented several more times).
By 1934 three or four people including Glaessner had realized
that the planktonic foraminifera, by floating far and wide and
establishing far-flung populations and communities before dying,
sinking and in due course fossilizing had a special potential
for correlating and geologically dating strata of Cretaceous and
Cainozoic age. It was Glaessner, however, who worked out the implications
most thoroughly in a meticulous compilation of the distribution
of species through time, giving zones based on that succession.
In that way, the geology of the Caucasus could be clarified and
petroleum exploration focused. This was at a time of urgent mapping
and drilling in the push to develop the mineral and fuel resources
of the Soviet Union. The Caucasus was Glaessner's second experience
of an Alpine belt (meaning a belt of rocks deformed, metamorphosed
and intruded in the past 100 million years) after the Alps themselves.
Petroleum exploration has long since been supplanted by deep-ocean
drilling and palaeoceanography as the main stimulus to and beneficiary
of marine micropalaeontology, but Glaessner's Moscow papers are
a very clear example of an intellectual antecedent to a burgeoning
discipline. Nor did his pioneering work stop with demonstrating
the consistently close correlation and age determination of strata
and hence of geological events. His experience in palaeobiology
and evolution in 'higher' organisms such as crabs and turtles
brought a blast of fresh air into micropalaeontology. The very
value of microfossils as a geological tool had put their study
too much in the hands of typologists, essentialists or 'stamp
collectors', who were not actually anti-evolutionists but whose
taxonomy too often amounted to the same thing. Glaessner, on the
other hand, was much more conscious of the additional attributes
of fossils as documents of evolutionary palaeobiology. I return
to that point below.
Port Moresby and Melbourne
Martin Glaessner met Tina Tupikina at a private New Year's banquet
in Moscow in 1933 when Tina, who came from the Urals, was a student (1).
He managed to dissuade her from volunteering for teaching service
in Mongolia, and to have her teach him successfully Russian.
Martin and Tina Glaessner were married in Moscow in 1936 and a
year later had to confront the choice newly presented by the Soviet
Government to all its foreign specialists: to take out Soviet
citizenship and remain, or to leave the country by the end of
1937. And so they left for Vienna in December 1937 where Martin
did some consulting on petroleum exploration in Slovakia. But
that was only a few months before the Anschluss, the advent
of which brought on a particularly dark period in Martin's life,
for a couple but only a couple of longstanding colleagues
distanced themselves from him. On 12 March the systematic degradation
and humiliation of the Jews began in earnest, on 19 March Martin
was arrested and put to work cleaning the windows of the German
army barracks. Meanwhile, he had been offered a job by George
Martin Lees, Chief Geologist of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company
(forerunner of British Petroleum). Lees was one of several postgraduate
students attracted to the outstanding geology department in the
University of Vienna in the late 1920s, and he and Glaessner formed
a firm and lasting friendship. Fortunately Martin's mother could
find that letter from Lees and rush it to the authorities, who
agreed to his release from detention and departure from Austria.
Lees went the crucial step further in hiring Martin for two tasks.
One assignment was to continue writing Principles of Micropalaeontology,
a project that arose out of his grasp of the broad field necessitated
by his Moscow contracts and his lecturing on the subject. The
Glaessners departed for London, where Martin pursued this task.
The other assignment was to set up a micro-palaeontological laboratory
for the Australasian Petroleum Company in Port Moresby, whither
they repaired in late 1938 via petroleum consulting in Java and
Sumatra. Tina's memory of that first laboratory is of a corrugated-iron,
timber-framed shed, cement-floored and low-roofed, about fifteen
feet square, and memorable especially for the naturalist's habits
of Glaessner's assistant Leo Stach, who would arrange his specimens
of the reef fauna immediately outside where the ants could clean
up the rotting flesh (2).
The Glaessners would spend the next decade in Port Moresby, before
and after the Pacific war, and in Melbourne where Martin was sent
to join the Army. He was directed to continue his work which was
seen as an essential contribution to the war effort. It produced
a comprehensive report on work in Papua and New Guinea, a geological
map on behalf of the Australian Army, work on samples from the
Middle East on behalf of Irak Petroleum Company, and completion
of his book. At that time Australia was very thinly populated
with palaeontologists. Curt Teichert (3) could recall but ten
full-time working palaeontologists in all of the country when
he arrived in 1937, supported perhaps by an equal number of amateur
or otherwise part-time workers.
Papua and Australian New Guinea presented many problems to the
geologist and palaeontologist. Situated in one of the geologically
most complex areas of the planet, it was also an extremely difficult
terrain for field work. Rock exposure was poor, under extensive
rainforests that clothed, in the more rugged areas, deeply dissected
lime-stones (karsts); and the region is traversed by great rivers.
Thus fossils in general and microfossils in particular were of
vital importance in reconstructing geological history. However,
the employment of fossils in this geology was no simple matter
and Glaessner immediately encountered the problems already found
by his forerunners in the Dutch East Indies to the west. What
those problems boiled down to was that in that region, known Eurocentrically
as the Far East (but the Indo-Pacific region to the biogeographers),
the fossils were different from the fossils found in the classical
areas where the time scale for the Mesozoic and Cainozoic eras
had been constructed, namely western Europe, so that correlation
by fossils back to the Europe-based standard geological time scale
tended to raise more problems than it solved.
The most successful response to that difficulty was to assemble
by induction and patient interpolation, from scattered outcrops
and drillholes, a succession of regional fossil assemblages based
on the large, phytosymbiont-bearing foraminifera, found in abundance
among the recrystallised corals, molluscs and algae in the great
tropical lime-stones. This systematic reconstruction of the fossil
succession began in the 1920s in the Dutch East Indies (van der
Vlerk, Umbgrove, Leupold, Tan Sin Hok) as the so-called Indo-Pacific
letter classification of the Cainozoic, and its use spread to
India, northern Australia, and the islands of the western Pacific.
One of Glaessner's first initiatives in adapting this schema to
Papua and Australian New Guinea was to prepare for the field parties
a Field Guide to the Study of Larger Foraminifera for the
Australasian Petroleum and Island Exploration Companies, for the
genera can be recognized by hand lens thus aiding the identification
of strata on the spot. One of the most magisterial of his papers
was a review of correlations throughout the Indo-Pacific region,
and in Time-stratigraphy and the Miocene Epoch he analysed
the framework for a critical time in the history of the region,
and of the Earth.
Meanwhile, the pioneering work on planktonic foraminiferal biostratigraphy
in the Caucasus was picked up and taken further by other palaeontologists
in another region of both geological complexity and petroleum
potential, the Caribbean, the culminating monograph being published
in 1956. By then, eastern and western micropalaeontology had developed
separately for almost two decades, creating difficulties such
as confusion in the nomenclature and identification of species.
Reconciliation began with Berggren (4). Occasionally in later years
Glaessner wondered aloud whether planktonic foraminiferal zonation
could have been developed subsequently in the southwest Pacific
instead of in the Caribbean region. With hindsight, the answer
was no, mostly because the appropriate fossil successions representing
deep-sea environments are too brief, in the sense of adequately
sampling geological time. Again, the geological and palaeontological
teams were much larger in the Caribbean than they ever were in
the south west Pacific. As well as that, though, Martin's penchant
for correlation and synthesis were ideally suited for the problems
of New Guinea geology. It was due to both the requirements of
the times and his own inclination that he exploited biostratigraphy
to its utmost as he went along, rather than developing a comprehensive
zonation de novo. It was always going to be that fossils
would clarify New Guinea geology more than the reverse.
New Guinea was Glaessner's third Alpine belt but, unlike the Alps
and Caucasus, caught between continental blocks, this belt was
caught between the Australian continent and the Pacific Ocean
and its marginal ocean basins. In his sweeping way, Glaessner
saw the many implications of a rigorously developed geological
succession of fossils. One was, of course, to target and then
analyse field surveys and drilling in the on-going, expensive
operation that is petroleum geology. Much of that work remained
in company files the fate, alas, of countless person-years'
effort in applied micropalaeontology all round the planet but
some emerged. I vividly remember Glaessner's 'reading' of the
companies' compilation, The Geological Results of Petroleum
Exploration in Western Papua, 1937-1961, to the Geological
Society of Australia in Adelaide in 1961 (5). Written ten years
after Martin had left Port Moresby and Melbourne, it shows his
very strong influence.
Another outcome was to review the context, once again to clarify
the big picture. With A.B. Edwards
of the CSIRO Mineragraphic Section, he wrote a monograph on the
mineral resources of the western Pacific islands. With two petroleum
exploration colleagues, he wrote the report that became a chapter
on Australian New Guinea for Edgeworth David's
Geology of the Commonwealth of Australia. With Curt Teichert,
he reviewed the evolving concepts of 'geosynclines', the great,
linear, filled depressions in the earth's crust that evolved into
folded mountain belts. But he found, too, that the island of New
Guinea was in the middle of one of the world's main arenas for
geotectonic theorizing. In its trenches and island arcs, the southwest
Pacific promised to be a modern analogue for ancient realms now
distorted and conflated into Alpine fold belts. Glaessner saw
that the geology of New Guinea and Melanesia was not known well
enough or widely enough and constituted a serious gap in the general
knowledge of the rich panorama of the southwest Pacific. Dutch
geologists, marine geologists and geophysicists had made great
advances in the East Indies in the 1930s and many of the theorists
of the time had had their say: Umbgrove, van Bemmelen, Kuenen,
Hess, Stille.
The area has thus become an important proving ground for modern
geotectonic hypotheses and theories, from Hobbs', Lakes', and
Umbgrove's theories of island arcs to du Toit's 'Wandering Continents',
E.C. Andrews' views on continental growth, van Bemmelen's undation
theory, and Woolnough's recent hypothesis combining the tetrahedral
theory of the earth's shape with continental migration in a modified
form and with the hypothesis of the origin of the moon from the
present site of the Pacific Basin in early geological time.
And so Glaessner sketched the geotectonic position of New Guinea
'as a basis for further discussion' (his italics), drawing
a series of tectonic conclusions, always constrained by current
knowledge, about the vast region of the southwest Pacific.
Yet another outcome was the biotic history of the Indo-Pacific
region and its interconnections with other biogeographic regions
through geological time. I leave until last perhaps the most spectacular
example of using microfossils to interpret a highly deformed terrain.
In his 'spare time', Glaessner did field work in the Port Moresby
district, always guided by laboratory determinations of the fossil
assemblages and produced a synthesis of lasting influence.
Principles of micropalaeontology
I return for a moment to Moscow and to the development of a laboratory,
research programme and lecture course in micropalaeontology. Concomitantly
with his uncovering the pattern of geological succession in the
planktonic foraminifera, Glaessner put a lot of effort into 'after-hours'
study of evolutionary relationships, using a balanced strategy
of anatomical similarities and geological distribution. In the
1930s, the taxonomy of the foraminifera was dominated by the indefatigable
J.A. Cushman of Massachusetts, whose output kept alive an in-house
journal an output, though, the accretion of which did not display
marked progress over the decades until his death in 1949, Cushman
being a pre-evolutionary typologist. A new generation of skeletal
anatomists and biostratigraphers were friendly with Glaessner
in the 1930s and 1940s: Helen Jean Plummer in Texas, Manfred Reichel
in Switzerland, Fritz Brotzen in Sweden, Tan Sin Hok in Java.
As well as contributing to that effort with his Moscow papers,
Glaessner could draw on a more profound knowledge of the European
literature back into the nineteenth century than could most, especially
in the English-speaking world. In Principles of Micropalaeontology,
begun in Moscow as lectures to the Petroleum Institute and also
the Palaeontological Institute at the University of Moscow in
1936-37, continued in London in 1938 and completed in Melbourne
in 1943 (published 1945), he surveyed the main groups of microfossils
their geological succession, environmental significance and importance
to petroleum exploration. The writing of the work was sponsored
by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, joined in 1943 by Standard Vacuum
Oil Company (New York).
The book also made a major original contribution to the taxonomy
of the foraminifera, putting their higher classification on a
firmer evolutionary footing than it had ever enjoyed before. In
its evolutionary taxonomic precepts, it bears a remarkable resemblance
to G.G. Simpson's influential classification of the mammals; in
a system dominated by Cushman's typology, that was a more noteworthy
achievement than seems to have been appreciated at the time (6).
Glaessner realized that fossils would reach their full potential
in correlation and age determination only when species were incorporated
into a pattern of speciation and extinction. He applauded the
morphogenetic method established in the 1930s by Tan Sin Hok,
by which successive events observed in the fossil record, constituting
an evolutionary 'bioseries', could be confirmed as occurring in
an orderly way in the same evolving lineage in different regions,
thus providing a rigorous biochronology.
Principles was not easy reading. Although Glaessner listed
it as a reference for his level III undergraduate course in Adelaide
in the 1950s, really it was the kind of monograph that seemed
to ripen and mature as the reader grasped the discipline more
securely through active experience.
The University of Adelaide
Towards the end of the 1940s, it seemed that Glaessner's association
with New Guinean geology and petroleum exploration was approaching
a natural conclusion. Certainly an offer from Sir Douglas Mawson
to join the academic staff at Adelaide was accepted with enthusiasm.
It was in Adelaide that he changed fields: the research shift
to the late Precambrian at age about fifty probably was the major
such event in Glaessner's career for the other main strands in
a remarkable range of productive interests all trace back to his
early years.
Mawson was appointed to the newly created chair of geology and
mineralogy in 1921 and he in turn appointed Cecil Madigan
soon after; they were highly influential both as individuals and
in combination until Madigan's death in 1947 (7). By 1950 there
was a new department of economic geology with Eric Rudd as professor
the companies that sponsored the chair wanted it placed at one
remove from Mawson's influence and the geology curriculum had
been broadened, at least in the areas of mineralogy and petrology
and regional geology but not in the 'soft-rock' domains of palaeontology
and stratigraphy. To redress that imbalance, Mawson contacted
Glaessner with an invitation to come to Adelaide, an invitation
that was accepted immediately. The two men rapidly developed a
firm friendship based on powerful and nonthreatening mutual respect.
Mawson was to retire in 1952 and he urged his new staff member
to apply for the chair, but to the Adelaide establishment of the
time, much as it was in the starchy 1940s as described by J.I.M.
Stewart in Myself and Michael Innes (8) a readership
for a Bohemian of Jewish origins and with Moscow connections was
acceptable but a chair may have been a bit too much. Indeed the
depth of Glaessner's knowledge and intellect, the crispness and
clarity of his speech were rapidly recognized well beyond the
disciplines of geology and palaeontology, but they were not sufficient
to get him a chair and may actually have been counter-productive
among the mandarins of academia; it took his nomination primo
loco for the Chair in Palaeontology at the University of
Vienna in 1964 to bestir Adelaide to offer him a personal Chair,
seven years after his election to the Australian Academy of Science
and when he was 57. He was one of the earliest Fellows of the
Academy. He considered moving again, upon retirement, but stayed
to spend almost four decades in Adelaide.
Glaessner came to a department and a town virtually without palaeontology
since the death of Walter Howchin
in 1936; there was but one specialist on living molluscs with
a minority interest in fossils (9). There was no stratigraphy,
sedimentology, or petroleum geology; there was no-one familiar
enough with the geologically young mountain belts to grasp problems
and progress in global tectonics. Australia as the 'oldest continent'
dominated geological thinking and Adelaide's graduates had a long
and impressive record at Broken Hill and other mining districts.
Into this milieu Glaessner brought several active research and
scholarly interests and a multilingual grasp of their literatures,
and he had an enormous impact. It was a time of change: Twidale (10)
points out that Australia's postwar immigration included several
geologists from Europe 'for whom the geological story did not
end with the Precambrian or Cambrian' and who integrated all the
diverse earth science disciplines into their thinking as a matter
of course. Glaessner was one of those who inculcated an attitude
of mind in the study of landscape (which Twidale was reviewing)
and in other fields the important point being that he was not
actively researching there but influencing those who were.
His impact on biology in the University of Adelaide was somewhat
less, for he was an historical biologist whereas the biological
departments were much stronger in functional biology
entomology, systematic botany, ecology, physiology, genetics
with minority interests in comparative morphology, taxonomy and
evolutionary biology.
I once heard this comment second-hand from Mawson: 'I brought
Glaessner to Adelaide to study the Archaeocyatha but he took off
down to Port Willunga and I've hardly seen him since'. The archaeocyaths
are a group of highly distinctive sponge-like organisms that evolved
in the shallow seas of the early Cambrian, flourished in a multitude
of species and went extinct, still within the Cambrian period;
their occurrences in the Flinders Ranges and on Fleurieu Peninsula
were well known internationally but their systematic study had
been sporadic. Martin tended to agree with A.A. Öpik, though,
that one should hesitate to direct a promising young student into
a field which, however fascinating, was too sparsely populated
by other workers for the project to register any real impact.
Likewise he was reluctant to encourage students into fields that
seemed not to promise employment. Thus he did little about developing
the major subdiscipline of vertebrate palaeontology, one of his
own interests and sustained in Australia by very few workers indeed.
It was only a couple of years after his arrival in Adelaide that
the first of the major 'modern' American expeditions into the
fossil-bearing outback of South Australia was mounted by R.A.
Stirton of Berkeley. That was the beginning of a long tradition
of American/Australian collaboration and expansion of employment
opportunities in which several of Glaessner's former students
were involved.
Cainozoic strata in southern Australia
The geologically young or Cainozoic sedimentary basins and fossils
of southern Australia, in which Glaessner became interested during
his Melbourne years, are very well represented in coastal exposures
south of Adelaide and he established a research programme there
with his first four postgraduates. The arguments for establishing
'Three foraminiferal zones in the Tertiary of Australia'
mark a truly fundamental change from the old to the new in the
stratigraphy of southern Australia, and it was not due merely
to the accretion of new facts and insights. Although the description
of fossil foraminiferal assemblages in southern Australia began
in the 1880s, until the 1940s, the emphasis in research on age
and correlation of the sediments remained firmly on the strata
themselves and their prominent and sometimes splendid fossil faunas
of molluscs. That was not at all strange, globally speaking, but
it was the limitations of the molluscs, especially in their provincialism
and their rarity in deeper-water strata, that forced the change
in effort to foraminiferal assemblages (as indeed in Glaessner's
own work in the Caucasus). His paper also introduced a timely
rigour in the precepts and processes of correlation and age determination.
Glaessner wrote the paper in part to record some important discoveries
by his friend and greatly esteemed amateur colleague Walter Parr,
who died prematurely in 1949.
During those years he was asked repeatedly to update Principles,
which had been reprinted in Melbourne and in the USA, but
he was caught, as it were, between an expanding field and his
own progressive withdrawal from active research in that field.
The 1950s were the time in foraminiferology of morphological analysis
stimulated in the '30s by Plummer, Reichel and Martin himself
('On a new family of foraminifera'), continuing in the '40s
with Brotzen's superb dissections, the highly promising technique
of lamellar analysis in which Alan Smout used thin sections to
look at the walls more closely than skeletal anatomists had done
hitherto, and the impact of Alan Wood's petrographic work. Then
came the big bursts of publication by Jan Hofker (Glaessner wrote
a brief commentary on Hofker's iconoclastic work) and, less idiosyncratically,
by Zeev Reiss. A sustained demand for a new edition of Principles
notwithstanding, there was too much foraminiferal research
to be digested here by one departing the field, to say nothing
of rapid advances in other microfossil groups in the enormous
postwar surge in marine geology. The book was reissued in 1963
but only with a new introduction to the text, mostly twenty years
old by then. Out-of-date it surely was; irrelevant in its philosophy
it surely was not.
An article in The Micropaleontologist in 1953 outlined
quite ebulliently Glaessner's plans for micropalaeontology, many
of which came to nothing because the need for laboratory assistance
was viewed unsympathetically by his Head of Department, A.R. Alderman;
some years later petroleum consulting provided the necessary salary
but by then he was well launched into the Ediacarian. Later, he
would state that lack of sympathy for the labour-intensive needs
of micropalaeontology was the main impulse for changing research
fields he was attracted to the Precambrian, certainly, but to
a significant degree he was discouraged from persisting in his
old field of micropalaeontology. Meanwhile, the Geological Survey
in the South Australian Department of Mines responded to the demands
of systematic geological mapping and the search for earth resources
by appointing a stratigrapher-palaeontologist and later a stratigrapher
working in petroleum geology. There were several characteristics
of South Australian geology the need for extensive drilling,
not least that made the big problems more easily tackled by
the Survey than by academia. Here too were factors in the shift.
A major paper on the Miocene came out in 1953 and the first on
the late Precambrian in 1954, neatly heralding the change. Even
so, Martin continued to consult in micropalaeontology in western
and southern Australia, New Guinea, New Caledonia. When the American
Museum of Natural History launched Micropalaeontology in
1955, the editors invited Glaessner to write the first paper,
a compelling review of the cross-links between taxonomy, biostratigraphy
and palaeoecology. Through the 1950s and early 1960s several postgraduate
students wrote theses on Cainozoic stratigraphy and micropalaeontology
under his supervision. A symposium on the Australian Cainozoic
record held at the Melbourne ANZAAS in 1967 was dominated by his
students. All his old interests produced new writing: fossils
from New Guinea, tectonics of the southwest Pacific and Australasia,
Indo-Pacific correlations, foraminiferal morphology and taxonomy,
decapod crustaceans. His last major effort on the foraminifera
was to review the major evolutionary trends on which he had based
the higher taxa established in Principles. It was not the
last of the foraminifera, though he was to write papers on some
of the very earliest forms known, as part of his next research
programme.
I should mention here Glaessner's brilliant lecturing in stratigraphy
at Adelaide: the third year course was one of those gems that
people knew about even though they had not taken it. It was the
ideal vehicle for his sweeping vision, beginning with the actual
record of the rocks and how and how not to interpret them,
and ranging into palaeogeography, tectonics and ancient climates.
One outcome of word getting around was the opinion that he should
write up the lectures as a book there were available the old-style
compendia of strata and the newer conflations of stratigraphy
and sedimentation, but there was still plenty of space for the
book he had in mind. But the revolution in sea-floor spreading
and continental drift terminated the plan, not because the lectures
became redundant but because he felt ill-equipped to put them
into the new context.
The first animals on earth
Adelaide gave its name to the Adelaide System, the rocks of the
Flinders-Mt Lofty Ranges, of late Proterozoic age ('Adelaidean';
more recently subsumed in the 'Neoproterozoic' era), extending
down with little or no break below the Cambrian with its typical
shelly fossils. Mawson and R.C. Sprigg described and named the
subdivisions of the Adelaide System and in 1946 Sprigg found numerous
'fossil jellyfish' in the Ediacara Hills. According to Sprigg
(11) they were dismissed at first inspection in 1947 by both Mawson
and Glaessner as fortuitous inorganic markings, not fossils. At
the time and also in retrospect, that was not a bad null hypothesis,
because there is quite a catalogue of pseudo-fossils hailed by
searchers keen to extend the fossil animal record back in time
into the vast emptiness 'below the trilobites'. For the fossil
record started very suddenly with trilobites and other shelly
fossils the quantum jump in the history of life at the base
of the Cambrian and except for 'algae' there seemed to be almost
no record of earlier life. This situation lasted from the early
nineteenth until well into the twentieth century and until there
were two major advances: the Ediacarian discovery, and discoveries
of microfossils in fine-grained cherts. (In the 1960s and 1970s
there were added the study of the stromatolites (built by algal
communities), organic geochemistry and stable isotopic studies,
plus indirect lines of enquiry such as 'molecular palaeontology'.
Glaessner took the initiative in the 1960s in finding funds and
students to tackle the first two of those.)
Thus when Glaessner looked again in the 1950s at the Ediacarian
'jellyfish' or medusoids, he was working in an intellectual milieu
ripe for advances into the terra incognita below the Cambrian.
And look again he did, in the first instance perhaps because Sprigg
added to his bestiary of jellyfish the highly distinctive Dickinsonia,
of doubtful affinities but probably in Sprigg's opinion a
Coelenterate too. But Glaessner thought that it was more likely
a 'worm'. Another advance was to study the frondlike 'algae' found
by Sprigg: they were identified as colonial Cnidarians. Again,
Glaessner added a new annelid and a couple of truly enigmatic
animals. By 1960 he was making such generalizations as the following:
(i) the fauna at Ediacara consisted of much more than only medusoids
or Coelenterata, for it included Coelomata of annelid-arthropod
affinities, which meant that phylogenetically very advanced animals
were among those appearing suddenly in the fossil record; (ii)
the fauna had genera in common with assemblages in South Africa
and England, thus were already global and not some local phenomenon;
(iii) the age of the Pound Quartzite was not early Cambrian but
Precambrian, and we surely had by now an assemblage of animals
truly antecedent to the first animals with mineralized skeletons.
At about that time, the French palaeontologists Henri and Geneviève
Termier proposed l'Ediacarien, premier étage paléontologique,
because in their opinion the first animals should signify
the first stage of the Phanerozoic eon; and Glaessner began using
'Ediacarian' informally in the 1960s.
The systematic study of the Ediacarian fossils was continued by
Glaessner and his research associate Mary Wade. There were several
dimensions to its context, as exemplified in these questions:
Given the lack of known faunas foreshadowing the Ediacarian with
its advanced animals, where did these come from? What are
the links, if any, with the succeeding Cambrian communities? How
cosmopolitan was the fauna and what are the limits to its geological
age? How come so many soft-bodied specimens are preserved so well
in shallow-water sands, a very rare event in the fossil record?
This research programme occupied much of the last thirty years
of Glaessner's career. In the broadest terms he had three objectives,
of which two were accomplished pretty well and one less so.
One of those goals was the geohistorical context, the distribution
of the Ediacarian fauna in space and time. Glaessner's efforts
to that end culminated in a major proposal with his friend Preston
Cloud to establish the Ediacarian as the initial period of the
Phanerozoic eon, characterized by the oldest known multicellular
animal life. The Ediacarian was sandwiched between the late Proterozoic
glaciations and the Cambrian and it took its place as the time
of major diversification of animals (which continued into the
Cambrian); by the early 1980s there were more than two dozen species
described as well as tracks on the seafloor, in a biota distributed
worldwide. Putting the base of the Ediacarian just at the top
of the glacial succession in the Flinders Ranges (and well below
the Pound Subgroup with its Ediacara member and the fossil assemblages)
was not merely convenient and suggestive but based on the presence
of the oldest known probable metazoan, Bunyerichnus dalgarnoi
Glaessner. In the 1990s Bunyerichnus lacks a champion
for its animalness and the Ediacarian is being promoted as a
somewhat shorter period at the top of the Neoproterozoic, not
at the bottom of the Phanerozoic eon.
Glaessner's second major goal was to write The Dawn of Animal
Life, which he also achieved in 1984 as 'a summary of the
results of 25 years of work and lecturing'. A thorough and typically
restrained major example of Glaessnerian scholarship, it was well
received as an authoritative statement of one view of the Ediacarian
biota and its place in earth and life history. One view? Glaessner's
very last scholarly efforts were to prepare for the requested
second edition of the Dawn, an edition that will not appear.
The Ediacarian organisms were, in his steadfast opinion, metazoans
animals the taxa from Ediacara itself or the Flinders Ranges
all (except one, of unknown affinity) being placed in still-living
animal phyla. An alternative viewpoint is the hypothesis by Adolf
Seilacher, that such a taxonomic classification is based on characteristics
which only seem to be animal, and that the 'Vendozoa',
as the bulk of the Ediacarian organisms have been called, are
an evolutionary experiment antecedent to the animals and not related
to them at all. Glaessner was aware of the hypothesis but waited
for years for something substantial to appear in the literature,
something to chew over and to respond to (he refused to comment
on media reports), and one of the very last things that he read
was Seilacher's Lethaia paper (12), by which he was not
convinced. He never read S.J. Gould's remark that his 'traditional
reading' one day will be called 'Glaessner's shoehorn or Glaessner's
insight, as the case may be' (13). Regardless of the outcome of
that debate and in 1994 'Glaessner's insight' is holding up
well amongst those most familiar with the Ediacarian fossils (e.g.
(14)) the Ediacarian research programme will stand as a major
achievement in getting much of the fauna described and analysed,
in bringing it to the attention of all who are interested in the
history of life on earth, in opening up the broader issues such
as chronostratigraphy and macroevolution, and in attracting several
productive students to work on the Ediacarian or on adjacent questions
in geohistory and biohistory. The latter included the study of
stromatolites and organic geochemistry.
Glaessner's third major hope was to produce a monograph of the
Ediacarian fossils, fully illustrated by photographs and reconstructions.
But he had a lifelong problem with as he perceived it a total
lack of artistic talent, so that he had to rely on others for
illustrations or drawn or modelled reconstructions. That was one
of several reasons for a collaboration, but the offer he made
to collaborate on a comprehensive atlas during his retirement
came to nothing and the atlas was never prepared.
Fossils and strata: Philosophy of biogeohistory
There are two major roots to the history of the Earth and its
biosphere. One was sometimes called 'natural history' and the
other 'natural philosophy'. Natural history is concerned primarily
with reconstructing the history of the Earth and begins with the
question: What is the pattern of rock and fossil relationships
in space and time? Research in that tradition built the geological
time scale and the succession of life. In natural philosophy on
the other hand we are engaged in understanding the processes
of geological change, that is, in asking, What are the processes
that have brought about those patterns? Earth and life history
clearly can dispense with neither root. In those terms Glaessner
was a natural historian, always restlessly exploring the implications
to earth and life history of his own and others' work of identifying
and classifying fossils and correlating the sedimentary strata
whence they were extracted. In another simplified but useful polarization,
he was a Lyellian 'gradualist', not a 'catastrophist'. It was
simply not to his taste or style to look for radical alternatives
when 'uniformitarian' models of earthly processes were available
and seemingly adequate.
Hence the central conclusion from his last research programme
that the Ediacarian biota belongs among the animal phyla still
flourishing today that the roots of animal evolution are to
be found in the Ediacarian, not immediately afterwards. Hence
too Glaessner's reluctance some would have said, notorious reluctance
to accept the theory of drifting continents in the 1950s. In
setting the geological story of New Guinea in the greater context
of the geotectonics of the southwest Pacific, he also set it in
the 'fixist' geotectonic paradigm of the 1940s, rejecting the
'drift' alternative in a footnote. His contribution to the Australian
celebration of the Darwinian centenary in 1959 was the interplay
between geographic isolation and communication in the history
of the Australian biota, the context being the rise and fall of
sea level, the growth and decay of island chains, the vicissitudes
of climatic fluctuation, but all in essentially the modern or
fixed configuration of oceans and continents. That was the ruling
paradigm, usually attributed to the influence of such biogeographers
as G.G. Simpson and Philip Darlington: that biogeography can be
analysed in terms of biotic mobility. If animals and plants can
disperse so efficiently, then why disperse continents to explain
their distributions?
Glaessner converted as rapidly as most to the theory of seafloor
spreading and its corollaries when their time came in the 1960s.
Probably he appreciated their significance as the first compelling
mechanism for continental drift more rapidly than most, simply
because he had a broader command of the pertinent biogeohistorical
evidence and pattern than did most. But he had been more acutely
aware than most that all too much geological and biological evidence
was not robust enough to carry theories of continental drift or
transoceanic land bridges, so that drift was a possible but not
a unique or particularly compelling explanation for spatio-temporal
patterns ranging from biogeographic disjunctions to geomagnetic
polarities. Before the revolution he was outspokenly conservative,
afterwards he was disengaged from geotectonics, being deeply involved
in the Ediacarian. Even so, he retained a very lively interest,
as Twidale (15) recalls: 'Nor did he make the mistake of clinging
to untenable theories. I well remember him making a spirited attack
on those who favoured large scale lateral movements (the 'drifters')
at the ANZAAS Conference held in Canberra in 1953, but once the
reality of plate tectonics was established no one was more innovative
and enthusiastic in using the theory and its implications to resolve
geological problems'.
Thus Martin was a gradualist, of the generation and more or less
of the mould of such outspoken American gradualists as G.G. Simpson
in palaeobiology and evolution, James Gilluly in general and regional
geology, and H.D. Hedberg in stratigraphy. He viewed with equanimity
and close interest the retreat of gradualism in earth history
during the 1970s-1980s (the appellation by the new triumphalists
is 'dogmatic gradualism'), without getting too excited about the
more radical palaeobiological claims of taxonomic cladism, punctuated
equilibrium and revolution during biospeciation, or earthly catastrophe
caused by the impact of heavenly bodies.
It is of some interest that his gradualistic bent was so strong
from the very early days onwards, for he was 'Anglo-American'
and not at all 'Germanic' in that. Martin always had an interest
in the functional morphology of animals and in organic evolution,
most of all in palaeontology as an integrated discipline, as would
be expected of a product of the Viennese school of Othenio Abel,
reinforced by his experience of the British Museum. He often drew
the parallel between the schools of palaeobiology, the central
European of the 1920s and the American of the 1970s, a parallel
later written up by W.E. Reif (16). I have mentioned his collaboration
on crustacean studies with Karl Beurlen whilst still in his mid-twenties.
Now Beurlen was also a systematist, stratigrapher and palaeobiologist
of comparably broad interests but he was the founder of the evolutionary
doctrine of 'typostrophism', a combination of orthogenesis (goal-directed
evolution), cyclism (one version of historicism), and saltationism
(sudden jumps in evolutionary lineages) the main proponent of
which was O.H. Schindewolf, a student of the tectonic geologist
Hans Stille known for his theory of sudden, worldwide episodes
of tectonism punctuating long periods of comparative calm. Include
the 'macromutationist' geneticist Richard Goldschmidt and we have
here a wide spread of the luminaries in the Germanic traditions
of idealistic morphology and its genetic and geological counterparts
(17), at a time when all of those elements were being rejected
or discredited by gradualists, particularly in the USA. With perhaps
two exceptions, there is no trace in Glaessner's work of this
tradition. One exception is that his experience with living and
fossil crustaceans gave him a respect for anatomical growth and
form that was marginalized in the 'modern synthesis' of evolutionary
theory in the 1930s and 1940s. Another just might be detectable
in his immense respect for the morphological/phylogenetic research
on the Indo-Pacific larger foraminifera by Tan Sin Hok.
Martin Glaessner the person
Although it turned out that he did not have to practise at law,
Glaessner's legal training would influence his habits of crisply
marshalling evidence and argument and presenting them in a precise,
clipped manner. One heard complaints from time to time that his
lecturing was rather difficult to understand for just that reason
more waffle, more circumlocution would have given the listener
sufficient time to absorb his main points and the student time
to make notes. Nor was there a superfluity of words in his writing.
One would hear too the opinion that Glaessner was dogmatic. His
advocacy certainly was forceful, but that did not hinder his ability
to abandon an intellectual position when it became untenable.
He developed the habit very early of reading up the context of
a problem exhaustively and writing a review, often including a
disclaimer that this was a 'preliminary' effort intended to stimulate
further discussion and research. But he did indeed speak and write
positively it was possible to disagree with him but it was very
difficult to misunderstand either his opinion or his uncertainty,
as the case may be.
Another great evolutionist of Germanic origin expressed his own
views on that matter in words that are remarkably apposite here.
Attracted to the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis, Ernst Mayr
(18) has written: 'Where the situation is quite unresolved, I
have described the opposing viewpoints in categorical, sometimes
almost one-sided, terms in order to provoke a rejoinder, if such
is justified. Because I hate beating about the bush, I have sometimes
been called dogmatic. I think this is the wrong epithet for my
attitude. A dogmatic person insists on being right, regardless
of opposing evidence. This has never been my attitude and, indeed,
I pride myself on having changed my mind on frequent occasions.
However, it is true that my tactic is to make sweeping categorical
statements. Whether or not this is a fault, in the free world
of the interchange of scientific ideas, is debatable. My own feeling
is that it leads more quickly to the ultimate solution than a
cautious sitting on the fence.' Mayr could have been describing
Glaessner.
That sort of personality can be perceived quite differently by
peers and students, those secure in their own standing and those
less secure, those who know some one well and those who do not.
Glaessner will be remembered affectionately by numerous former
students, including many who did not study advanced palaeontology.
His supervisor-postgraduate relationships would typically be a
strengthening mutual regard punctuated by disagreements. Those
disagreements could be strong and exchanges could be heated, but
that made no difference to his respect for his students' maturing
opinions and especially to his support of them in public or in
the presence of others. Basically a somewhat shy man, he cared
about his students, his colleagues and his profession to a degree
that sadly was not always fully apparent behind a somewhat abrupt
comment, a forceful advocacy of an opinion, even an eruption.
Not a frequenter of the departmental tearoom, nor one to take
kindly to the casual daily interruptions that sustained a few
adademics of his generation, he pulled his weight and more in
teaching, supervision and administration. As acting Head he ran
departmental meetings crisply and formally. His relationships
with his colleagues were friendly in the main but not particularly
close. He never hesitated when prompt action on his part could
avert someone's personal problem or a more general difficulty.
There were more acts of kindness as quiet words, telephone calls,
or notes than we will ever know.
In his retirement Martin was the soul of tact, taking a close
interest in the affairs of the Department and of the profession,
always willing to contribute opinions and references when asked
but not intervening. To the end he retained his lifelong balance
of interests between the basic, philosophical underpinnings of
his sciences and their economic applications.
Glaessner disposed of his micropalaeontological library on his
retirement. His remaining research and scholarly library was bequeathed
to the South Australian Museum.
A career spanning 65 years of research, scholarship and service
to the profession concluded with his death on 23 November 1989.
Martin Glaessner is survived by Tina, his wife of 52 years, and
their daughter Verina, a writer and journalist living in London.
An acknowledgement in the Dawn reads: 'It will be obvious
to readers that I and perhaps they too owe much gratitude
to my wife Tina who patiently taught me Russian fifty years ago.
I must thank her also for preventing my own premature fossilization.'
Service to science and profession
Glaessner's contribution to the Australian war effort was to work
on a map of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea and other tasks
for the Australian Army, the review of resources with A.B. Edwards
being in the latter category.
He was the senior author of 'Stratigraphic nomenclature in
Australia', the founding document on the Australian Code of
Stratigraphic Nomenclature; this country was the third, after
the USA and Canada, to adopt a stratigraphic code. When he resigned
from membership of the International Sub-commission on Stratigraphic
Classification of the IUGS Commission on Stratigraphy in 1989,
he was one of only four remaining of the original 32 charter members
of 1955. He was one of the editorial board selected by Menner
and Hedberg to scrutinize preparation of the ISSC International
Stratigraphic Guide. In that kind of work one saw at its most
impressive the fusing of the rigour born of legal training with
the vision of the true historian. He was very strong on the need
for codes and constraints and the discipline needed to effect
communication; he was extremely quick at the same time to spot
and criticize legalism and pendantry.
In his retirement he enjoyed sitting on the South Australian Underground
Waters Appeal Board, then the South Australian Water Resources
Tribunal (1972-1982). He was Consultant to the governments of
Greece and the Bahamas on geology related to the International
Law of the Sea (1973, 1975-1978).
His contributions to editing included being the first Honorary
Editor of the Geological Society of Australia (1953-1958). In
that position he took the initiatives that produced in due course
the regional geologies of the Australian states, co-editing himself
Geology of South Australia. He co-edited the Sir Douglas
Mawson Anniversary Volume. In retirement he planned and edited
The Geosciences in Australia for the 25th International
Geological Congress, held in Sydney in 1976. An outcome of a co-convened
symposium at that IGC was Contributions to the Geological Time
Scale. For many years he was an editor of the Elsevier review
journal Earth-Science Reviews.
Elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 1957, he served
on the Council, 1960-62, and was Chairman of the National Committee
of Geological Sciences, 1962-1977.
Positions and awards
-
LID University of Vienna (1929), PhD University of Vienna (1931),
DSc University of Melbourne (1946).
-
Member, Order of Australia (AM), 1985 ('services to geology, particularly
micropalaeontology').
-
Fellow, Australian Academy of Science (FAA), 1957.
-
Honorary Member, Correspondent, or Fellow of similar bodies in
India, England, USA, Austria, Germany.
-
Lyell Medal, The Geological Society.
-
Suess Medal, Geological Society of Austria: one of about seven
such awards made to Austrian geologists of eminence and distinction.
-
Walcott Medal, US National Academy of Sciences, 1982: for his
'perceptive, worldwide biological and palaeoecological analyses
of the earliest Metazoa, which have extended over a quarter century
and have illuminated the beginnings of Phanerozoic evolution'.
(Given every five years since 1934 for advancement of knowledge
of pre-Cambrian and Cambrian life and its history in any part
of the world.)
-
Clarke Memorial Lecturer, Royal Society of New South Wales.
-
Walter Burfitt Prize.
- Verco Medal, Royal Society of South Australia.
-
Research Associate in the Geology Department, Natural History
Museum, Vienna, 1923-1932.
-
Research Associate, British Museum (Natural History), 1930-31.
-
Adult Education Lecturer on Historical and Economic Geology, Vienna,
1930 and 1931.
-
Foreign Specialist (Senior Research Scientist), State Petroleum
Research Institute of the USSR, Moscow, 1932-34.
-
Senior Research Officer, Institute of Mineral Fuels, Academy of
Sciences of the USSR, Moscow, 1934-37.
-
Part-time Lecturer at the Moscow Petroleum Institute and at the
Palaeontological Institute, University of Moscow, 1936.
-
Petroleum consulting in Slovakia from Vienna, 1937.
-
Geologist, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, London, 1938.
-
Chief Palaeontologist, joint oil exploration companies, Port Moresby
and Melbourne, 1938-1950.
-
Honorary Research Associate, American Museum of Natural History,
1950-1970.
-
Associate, South Australian Museum, 1953-1989.
-
The University of Adelaide: Senior Lecturer, 1950-52, Reader,
1953-63, Professor of Geology & Palaeontology, 1964-71, Professor
Emeritus, 1972-89.
-
Distinguished Lecturer, American Geological Institute, 1963.
-
Australian Research Grants Committee, 1970-72.
-
Board, International Geological Correlation Program (UNESCO),
1973-78.
-
South Australian Underground Waters Appeals Board, 1972-76, South
Australian Water Resources Tribunal, 1976-82.
Acknowledgments
The manuscript was read by Mrs Tina Glaessner, Mrs Verina Glaessner,
Mrs Susi McGowran, Dr Richard Jenkins, Dr Bill Stuart, Professor
Peter Bishop, Dr Rowley Twidale, Dr John Jones, Mr Lee Parkin,
Mr Neville Pledge, Mr David Taylor, and the Editor, and I am grateful
for both their general impressions and their more specific corrections
and suggestions. I am responsible for the imbalances and errors
that remain. It is a special privilege to acknowledge Mrs Glaessner's
reminiscences and comments and her encouragement, as well as the
loan of photographs. Professor H.G. Küpper (Vienna) provided
some most useful information. Mrs Sophia Craddock typed the first
draft of the bibliography and Mr Richard Barrett did the portrait,
taken in 1988, and re-did the other photography.
References
An account of Glaessner's career with bibliography was presented
by Dorothy Hill to a
colloquium marking his retirement and published in Jones and McGowran
(19, 20). I have written brief tributes in local newsletters (6,
21) as have Vogel (22) and Küpper (23) in his first Sprachraum,
and Cloud (24) (who initiated the award of the Walcott Medal).
B.P. Radhakrishna, Editor of the Geological Society of India,
produced The World of Martin F. Glaessner (25), beginning
his Preface thus: 'Professor Martin F. Glaessner was the most
outstanding palaeontologist of his time and the earliest to be
elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Geological Society of India'.
(1) Glaessner, T., 1991. Reminiscences. In [xvi], xi-xix.
(2) Glaessner, T., 1991. Reminiscences. In [xvi], xi-xix.
(3) Teichert, C., 1991. Palaentology in Australia 50 years ago.
Nomen Nudum (Association of Australasian Palaeontologists)
20: 2-4.
(4) Berggren, W.A., 1960. Paleogene biostratigraphy and planktonic
foraminifera of the SW Soviet Union: an analysis of recent Soviet
investigations. Stockholm Contributions in Geology 6:63-125.
(5) Australasian Petroleum Company, 1961. Geological results of
petroleum exploration in western Papua 1937-1961. J. Geol.
Soc. Australia 8:1-133.
(6) McGowran, B., 1971. On foraminiferal taxonomy. In: A. Farinacci,
ed. Proc. 2nd Planktonics Conference, Roma 1970. Edizioni
Tecnoscienza, Roma, pp.813-820.
(7) Alderman, A.R., 1967. The development of geology in South
Australia: a personal view. Records of the Australian Academy
of Science 1(2), 30-52.
(8) Stewart, J.I.M., 1987. Myself and Michael Innes: a memoir.
Gollancz, London, 206pp.
(9)Teichert, C., 1991. Palaentology in Australia 50 years ago.
Nomen Nudum (Association of Australasian Palaeontologists)
20: 2-4.
(10) Twidale, C.R., 1986. Understanding landscape. In: Ideas
and Endeavours The Natural Sciences in South Australia.
Royal Soc. South Australia (1986), 1-27.
(11) Sprigg, R.C., 1991. Martin F. Glaessner, palaeontologist extraordinaire.
In [xvi], 13-20.
(12) Seilacher, A., 1989. Vendozoa: organismic construction in
the Proterozoic biosphere. Lethaia 22: 229-239.
(13) Gould, S.J., 1990. Wonderful life: the Burgess Shale and the
nature of history. Hutchinson Radius, 347pp.
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