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The Evolution and Biogeography of Henry F. Howden

Article in The Coleopterists Bulletin · December 2006

DOI: 10.1649/0010-065X(2006)60[7:TEABOH]2.0.CO;2

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Coleopterists Society Monograph Number 5:7–18. 2006.

THE EVOLUTION AND BIOGEOGRAPHY OF HENRY F. HOWDEN

BRUCE D. GILL
Quarantine Entomology Laboratory, Canadian Food Inspection Agency
Bldg. 18, 960 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, CANADA K1A 0C6
GillBD@inspection.gc.ca

Taxon. Henry Fuller Howden, B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.

Synonyms. Henry F. Howden Jr., Henry Howden, Dr. Howden, Professor
Howden, HF Howden, HFH, ‘‘Henry’’, and ‘‘Harry’’.
Key phrases. Emeritus Professor of Biology, insect systematist, World scarab
specialist.
Etymology. Phylogenetic reconstruction indicates that the Howden surname is of
Palaearctic origin, dating back to post-glacial Wales. The ancestral Howden clan
dispersed northwards into Scotland sometime after the 14th Century A.D.,
settling near present-day Edinburgh. The Howden name crossed the Atlantic (a
major water barrier) by Henry’s grandfather in the late 1700s. The given names
‘‘Henry Fuller’’ were assigned to the first born son in accordance with local
traditions of the southern United States where this Nearctic lineage had settled.
Any indication of the young child being named Bolbo Cera Howden or George
(Geo.) Trooper Howden were presumably rejected by parents or suppressed
under the plenary powers of his grandparents. The name is masculine in gender.
Distribution. The countries shaded in black (Fig. 1) indicate known migration
areas of Henry F. Howden based upon collecting records and field observations.
The four stars (inset map of eastern North America) indicate sites of nesting
behavior and successful reproduction.
Developmental Biology. Henry Fuller Howden was conceived mid-November
1924, about the time that RCA transmitted the first pictures by wireless telegraph
from London to New York. These two events, though unrelated, would each have
a profound impact upon the World. The Dow Jones averaged 99.7 for 1924.
Henry’s anisogametic union (one of very few unions that he would likely endorse)
was followed by a mandatory nine month ontogeny, leading to parturition on
19.VIII.1925 in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. In layman’s terms, he was born
August 19th, 1925. This was four years after the birth of Gene Roddenberry (a
fellow American visionary), and six years after the birth of Malcolm Forbes
(likewise a successful American publisher). August 19th was an auspicious date.
The Dow Jones average had risen to 134.5 for 1925.
The young Henry was the only child of Henry Fuller Howden Sr. and Elizabeth
Floyd Swan. The elder Howden was born in Beaufort, South Carolina in 1891
and married Miss Swan in New York in 1917. They settled in Baltimore where he
worked as a civil engineer. The elder Henry died from typhoid fever in May 1926,
before young Henry would celebrate his first birthday. Henry’s mother never
remarried; further evidence that Cygnus mate for life.
Henry Jr. spent his formative years in the Baltimore area. His first 10 years of
schooling were completed at a local military academy, followed by two years in
the ROTC. A precocious naturalist, he explored the local region collecting

7
8 COLEOPTERISTS SOCIETY MONOGRAPH NUMBER 5, 2006

Fig. 1. Map indicating countries (in black) where Henry F. Howden has conducted field
work. Stars on the inset map of eastern North America show cities of residence.

butterflies, chasing reptiles and amphibians, and otherwise appreciating the rich
fauna of the eastern United States. His command of the insect net was superlative,
to the point that he became an Honorary Member of the Maryland Academy of
Sciences at the age of 12, based on his collection of butterflies and moths. One of
the few ichnofossils from this period (Fig. 2) is dated October 1937. For a young
military cadet, it would appear that he was following the sage advice of Samuel
Clemens (aka Mark Twain), not to let his schooling interfere with his education.
By the age of 14, Henry made his first investment in the commodities market.
He sold off his Lepidoptera collection and used the proceeds to purchase a set of
Cornell drawers. These were used to house his expanding beetle collection. This
was a very wise investment by all accounts and would certainly have been
endorsed by the Coleopterists Society had it existed at that time. The Dow Jones
was up to 142.7 for the year.
With numerous relatives (aunts, uncles, and other closely related taxa) living in
Savannah, Georgia, holidays and summer vacations offered an opportunity to
explore new habitats and their associated biota. Some of his captures were
brought back alive to Baltimore for more intensive observation. One of these
subjects was a rattlesnake, kept in his bedroom of course. It is safe to assume that
it was securely caged, except for those times when it escaped. It was on one of
these latter occasions that master Henry, upon returning home from school,
observed a rattlesnake coiled up on the roof of their house. Knowing that native
Crotalus are not typically arboreal, the young Howden hypothesized that the
snake perched next to his slightly-ajar bedroom window must be his pet Roscoe
and not a neighborhood stray. After hurrying inside, he confirmed that Roscoe’s
cage was indeed empty. He somehow managed to get the snake off the roof and
securely fastened back into its cage without alerting his mother. History doesn’t
 COLEOPTERISTS SOCIETY MONOGRAPH NUMBER 5, 2006 9

Fig. 2. Henry F. Howden at the age of 12 in Maryland, U.S.A. (1937).

record whether this breach of biosecurity was ever reported to the management or
to the cleaning staff. It does, however, demonstrate an incipient resourcefulness in
times of stress, and supports the hypothesis that a very tolerant mother is
a prerequisite for the successful development of a young biologist.
Upon graduation, Henry was accepted into the University of Maryland in
1941, where he commenced his studies in the Department of Entomology and
Zoology. Like many young males of his day, his university training would be
interrupted by the aspirations of Japanese imperialism and their surprise visit to
Hawaii. In celebration of his 19th birthday, Uncle Sam provided him with a draft
notice in the summer of 1944. With his degree nearly complete, he enlisted in the
Army with the hopes of joining their medical entomology corps. Like all
entrenched bureaucracies, he was promptly assigned to the Air Force as an NCO
10 COLEOPTERISTS SOCIETY MONOGRAPH NUMBER 5, 2006

based on his educational achievements. This was the only branch of the U.S.
services that didn’t have any use for entomologists. Before leaving College Park,
however, he had caught the attention of a young entomologist in her freshman
year. Although they never spoke, he looked like a prospect with potential in the
eyes of Anne Thompson.
Completing boot camp at Fort Mead, Maryland, Henry was posted to a base in
Texas where he served as a drill instructor. His university training in statistics and
probability theory were put to good use, and each month he sent home an
allowance that was typically several times the value of his pay. He must have
received top marks in those courses, because he only missed sending his monthly
gifts a couple of times. A kind and tolerant mother should always be rewarded.
The Dow Jones had climbed to169.8 for the year.
From Texas, he was transferred to Colorado to learn the art of fire-fighting.
The pilots of early jet aircraft had yet to perfect the art of landing, and Henry
freely admits that he spent much of this time digging the remains of jet engines
out of the ground. This experience may have led to his predisposition for using
shovels to obtain good specimens. In any event, he was shipped out to Hamilton
Field near San Francisco to await deployment to the Pacific theater. On the day
of his scheduled departure for Okinawa, the Base medical technician came down
with acute appendicitis. Henry was yanked from the line and pressed into
immediate service. He spent the next year at Hamilton Field running the
diagnostic lab and becoming proficient with hypodermic needles, both to
withdraw blood and to administer shots. His first trip to the tropics would have to
await peacetime, and the only shots that he fired during the war were through the
barrel of a syringe.
Completing military service in 1946, Howden returned to College Park to
resume his studies. He received his B.Sc. (1946) and was accepted directly into the
graduate program in the Department of Entomology and Zoology. Because the
academic year had already commenced and the entomology professors had their
full quota of graduate students, Henry was relegated to studying fish diversity in
the Potomac River under zoologist Robert A. Littleford. The Howden insect net
was seemingly going to be hung-up in favor of bigger nets.
Anne Thompson was now a senior in entomology, and she began dating the
dapper young Howden (Fig. 3). They would spend their free time collecting
insects in various parts of the state. Transport was provided by Henry’s first car,
a well-used 1929 Dodge, purchased with savings from his GI days. ‘‘Well-used’’
meant rusted floorboards allowing the occupants full view of the road surfaces
and any geotrupine push-ups. It also included a ‘‘dodgy’’ starter motor, requiring
the driver to plan ahead and park on an incline if there was to be any guarantee
about getting the vehicle restarted. This practical experience would come in handy
years later when conducting field work in remote areas of Latin American and
Australia with well-used rental cars.
After completing his aquatic field work and writing up the results, Henry (or
perhaps his committee) decided that fish biology was not for him. With the
approval of all parties, he switched back into entomology, breathed a sigh of
relief, and completed his M.Sc. in Entomology in 1949. The year 1949 was also
memorable when he relinquished his bachelor status and married Anne
Thompson on September 3rd in Baltimore. Their honeymoon was spent in
Maryland, traveling in a new 1949 Ford. It was a wedding gift from Henry’s
mother and had plenty of room for bug nets and collecting gear. And the Dow
Jones was heading towards 200.
 COLEOPTERISTS SOCIETY MONOGRAPH NUMBER 5, 2006 11

Fig. 3. Henry F. Howden, at the age of 23 at the University of Maryland (1948).

12 COLEOPTERISTS SOCIETY MONOGRAPH NUMBER 5, 2006

Fig. 4. Either a Scotsman has dropped a nickel or Henry F. Howden is digging up some
good geotrupines at Interlachen, Florida (1951). [From the Coleopterists Bulletin 6: 44 (1952)]

Anne, who had started her own insect collection at the age of 11, was now
enrolled in graduate studies at North Carolina State University in Raleigh,
studying the succession of insects on carrion. Henry followed along to Raleigh
and was accepted into the Ph.D. program. Under the guidance of Professor Paul
O. Ritcher, he embarked on a study of the taxonomy and biology of geotrupine
scarabs. It was a field of research that would keep him occupied for the next half
century. For the purposes of his degree, he wisely limited his thesis to the fauna of
North America.
Henry and Anne were both avid field biologists and spent many weeks in the
field, collecting throughout the southeastern United States. Many of their trips
involved camping, running bug lights, and servicing pitfall traps baited with
attractive compounds such as butyric acid, propionic acid, animal entrails, and
dung. In addition to nets, they were armed with an assortment of trowels, shovels,
and post-hole diggers needed to install traps or to remove beetles from their
subterranean galleries. Passing motorists would no doubt wonder about the man
at the center of the excavation (Fig. 4). Looking for bugs? No, they knew he was
really working on some buried treasure, and it was probably Spanish!
On some of these sorties, Henry and Anne were joined by Henry K. Townes
and his wife Marjorie. Henry Townes had been hired by North Carolina State
University in 1949 to work on tobacco pests, but in reality he was a consummate
collector and ichneumonid systematist. The Howdens and the Townes got on well
and the two families would maintain a life-long friendship, each supporting the
others seemingly insatiable appetite for chitin. The Townes left Raleigh in 1956 to
settle in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where they would establish the American
Entomological Institute (A.E.I.) in 1964. Howden would later serve on the Board
of Directors of the A.E.I. from 1975 to 1996.
When Ritcher left North Carolina State in 1952 to take over the Chair of
Entomology at Oregon State University, Professor T. B. Mitchell (the respected
 COLEOPTERISTS SOCIETY MONOGRAPH NUMBER 5, 2006 13

bee biologist) filled in as Henry’s supervisor. His dissertation on the Geotrupinae

of North America was accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the U.S.
National Museum almost before it was accepted by the University. It was well-
illustrated and included a wealth of information on the taxonomy, biology, and
larval morphology of these beetles. A half century later, it remains the standard
reference for these scarabs. Henry received his degree in 1953, the first Ph.D. to be
awarded in Entomology by North Carolina State University. With five
publications to his credit, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the
Department of Entomology and Zoology at the University of Tennessee. Things
were looking good and the Dow Jones was up to 276.
Arriving in Knoxville, Tennessee, Henry and Anne bought their first house
with assistance from the GI Bill after having spent a few weeks in a cramped
‘‘apartment’’ hidden in the back a garage. In April of 1954 Anne gave birth to
Patience, the first of their three daughters. Second daughter Barbara was born the
following August. From the start, Henry was kept busy with a heavy teaching
load of general biology, entomology, and evolution. The concept of evolution did
not sit well with some of his students, but he told them that they didn’t have to
embrace it, they just had to understand it and answer the questions. He took on
his first graduate student and continued his research on scarab beetles, publishing
ten papers over the next four years.
Henry became active in a number of scientific societies, including the
Entomological Society of America, which he joined in 1951. With a $4.00 annual
membership in the recently organized Coleopterists Society, he assumed the
duties of the News Editor for the Coleopterists Bulletin in February 1954 and
became a Contributing Editor the following year. He posted his first exchange
notice in the April 1954 Bulletin, offering named specimens of the larger families
of Coleoptera in return for Geotrupinae. At 29 years of age, he was back into the
markets, investing in geotrupine futures. The Dow Jones had risen to 334.
The mid-1950s were also the height of the Cold War, and the U. S. Atomic
Energy Commission at Oak Ridge was keen to study the effects of radiation on
insects. Since the university only paid their staff during the eight month academic
year, faculty members were encouraged to find alternate sources of income during
the summer months. Henry took this opportunity to become a seasonal
consultant at Oak Ridge. This added another dimension to his research and
helped supplement the family income. After all, raising a family and providing
Cornell drawers for a two-collector household can be a financial challenge for
many junior faculty members.
In late December 1953, the American Association for the Advancement of
Science held their annual meetings in Boston. This included meetings of the
Society of Systematic Zoology and the Society for the Study of Evolution. Ross
Arnett Jr. later reported in the Coleopterists Bulletin that the Sunday evening
Smoker held in the offices of Dr. A. S. Romer, Director of the Museum of
Comparative Zoology, had attracted one of the largest gatherings of coleopterists
he had ever seen including Phil Darlington, Barry Valentine, Frank Young, Dick
Blackwelder, Floyd Werner, R. R. Driesbach, Bill Brown, and Henry Howden.
Attending these meetings likely opened up a number of opportunities for the
young Assistant Professor from Tennessee, perhaps even cigar smoking.
Dispersal Behavior. Henry’s productivity as a scientist and a collector had caught
the attention of entomologists in Ottawa. In the summer of 1956, George P.
Holland, W. J. (Bill) Brown, and W. R. M. (Bill) Mason made a couple of visits to
Knoxville to see about recruiting Henry for a job in Ottawa. On their last visit
14 COLEOPTERISTS SOCIETY MONOGRAPH NUMBER 5, 2006

they went off on a collecting trip, and, being suitably impressed, offered Henry
a job as a research scientist. He would be free to work full time on beetle
systematics, and they were authorized to offer an annual salary $1000 higher than
he was currently receiving. Henry discussed the offer with Anne. Should he give
up a grueling teaching load in favor of full time research on beetles? Yes, that
decision would be easy to make. However, it would also have to make economic
sense, since there were now four mouths to feed, and the price of Cornell drawers
was rising. Henry pointed out that his moving expenses alone would chew up any
salary increase for the next few years. Covering international moving expenses
had never been done before, but Holland assured Henry that he would look into
the matter once he returned to Ottawa. The Howden luck prevailed, and a month
later Henry received a telephone call saying yes, they would cover moving
expenses. Henry flew up to Ottawa for a brief visit in February 1957 to finalize the
deal. Ottawa welcomed him with an exceptionally mild midwinter thaw, inspiring
him to remark that Canadian winters ‘‘didn’t seem so bad’’. George Holland
replied that he should have visited the previous week, when temperatures were
hovering at a blustery 230uC. But until 230u is experienced firsthand, it remains
just an abstract number, and Henry signed on the dotted line. He couldn’t say
that he wasn’t warned.
Henry returned to Knoxville, and the family initiated their migratory
preparations. In late July they attached a rental trailer to their 1949 Ford (to
carry their beetle collections) and headed north to Canada. They arrived in
Ottawa on August 2nd, a Friday before a long weekend. Stopping by the house of
Bill and Edith Mason, Henry was told by Edith ‘‘to get himself over to the
Central Experimental Farm right away and sign in’’. This would ensure he would
get paid for the Saturday, Sunday, and holiday Monday. Scottish roots run deep
in the Ottawa Valley, and there is more than an ounce of Scot in the Howden
name. As a result of Edith’s advice, Henry officially joined the staff of the
Systematic Entomology Unit on August 2nd, 1957 as a scarab beetle expert. The
Dow Jones average was pushing 476.
After a month of house-sitting for the Masons, who had left on a lengthy
collecting trip, Henry and Anne located and purchased their own house. Situated
on a dirt road at the western edge of town, 23 Trillium Avenue backed onto
a farmers’ field and would provide excellent beetle hunting for years to come.
With various changes and additions, it would also serve as their home for the next
half century and become a landmark to entomological visitors (especially beetle
workers) from around the world.
Henry settled in at the Department of Agriculture alongside Edward C. Becker,
William J. Brown, Stanton Hicks, and Raymond de Ruette in the Coleoptera
Section. He initiated his research program on beetles, which was captured in the
Minister of Agriculture’s annual report to the Governor General with the simple
words ‘‘research on the classification of dung beetles and long-horned borers had
been initiated’’. One can only hope that Her Majesty’s representative in Canada
was suitably impressed.
Not wanting to miss a field season as the summer of 1958 approached, Henry
requested and was given permission to spend several months in the field. If he
would visit research stations and scientists along the way, the Department would
cover his expenses. Needing no further incentive, he loaded up the family car with
wife, kids, and camping gear and headed out to British Columbia. Having the
kids in the back seat meant they could keep each other amused during the long
hours of travel. What the neophyte parents did not expect was that this
amusement would cost them a few specimens along the way. Eldest daughter
 COLEOPTERISTS SOCIETY MONOGRAPH NUMBER 5, 2006 15

Patience (4 years old) discovered how to uncork mommy and daddy’s killing
bottles and began feeding dead beetles to her younger sister. What fun!
Fortunately this activity was curtailed before too many specimens were lost to
their clever entomophagous offspring.
Arriving in the southern Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, they found
good collecting and budget accommodations at a motel near Vaseaux Lake. Some
time later, two additional beetle collectors showed up in the form of George Ball
and Carl Lindroth. These carabid hunters rented a neighboring room, and Anne
soon became camp chef, preparing meals for the whole crew. During this trip they
also met Dick Selander who invited Henry to extend his collecting season with
a trip to Mexico. Henry relayed this information back to Ottawa and was given
an on-the-spot approval by his boss, George Holland, to participate. No detailed
forms needed to be filled out, no multi-page justifications, travel plans, nor
budgets had to be submitted. A simple question and a straight-forward answer.
The only encumbrance was ‘‘to remember to save receipts’’. Like the passenger
pigeon, those days of streamlined management have long since gone extinct.
Dropping the family off in Ottawa, Henry carried on to Mexico with Selander
and Ed Mockford. This 1958 trip gave Henry his first taste of Mexican field work
and, though his Baltimore palate would never quite adapt to chili peppers, he
would return many times in the coming decades for additional collecting. He
would also go on to publish papers with several Mexican colleagues and become
an Honorary Member of the Institute of Ecology in Xalapa.
By the fall of 1959, Henry and Anne were settling in to their new surroundings,
having welcomed their 3rd daughter, Lucile, into the family. The Soviet Union
had successfully launched Sputnik, and there was increased funding in North
America for basic research, including entomology. Over the next ten years, Henry
published 33 papers on scarabs, cerambycids and nitidulids, including mono-
graphic treatments of various genera and subfamilies for North and Central
America. He participated in several major institute expeditions to Mexico, and on
one of these (a 1964 trip to Durango), he assisted J. E. H. (Jack) Martin in making
a 16mm film of the event. Other field work took him to the southern United
States and the Caribbean as well as visits to many of the major entomology
collections in North America and to the British Museum of Natural History,
London. An extended stay in London allowed him to study the type material of
the Biologia Centrali-Americana scarabs and to arrange an exchange of duplicate
material with the Canadian National Collection, thereby enhancing both
collections.
Punctuated Equilibrium. By the late 1960s the steadily increasing red-tape and
bureaucracy in government was enough to convince Henry that a return to
teaching was in order. In 1967, at the invitation of P. J. Darlington, he spent six
months at Harvard University as a visiting Agassiz Lecturer, developing the
concepts of biogeography as they applied to insects. In addition to publishing
several papers on this topic, he coauthored a paper with Howard E. Evans and
E. O. Wilson on proposed nomenclatural changes in animal taxonomy. The Dow
Jones average was 879.12 for the year.
Returning to Ottawa, he continued his leave of absence from the Department
of Agriculture, and, with the active encouragement of Herbert H. J. Nesbitt,
began teaching at Carleton University. Nesbitt himself had started as an
acarologist with the Department of Agriculture in 1939 but left in 1948 to help
establish the university. By 1968, Nesbitt had risen to Dean of Science and was
keen to expand the Biology Department, and Henry was happy to help in this
16 COLEOPTERISTS SOCIETY MONOGRAPH NUMBER 5, 2006

expansion cycle. He enjoyed his return to teaching and resigned his position at
Agriculture on August 31, 1970, accepting a position as Full Professor of Biology
at Carleton University. He had made the jump into a new adaptive zone.
Howden’s return to academia brought with it students, lots of them, plus
NSERC operating grants, a scanning electron microscope, a secretary, and a series
of technicians to help keep things running. In addition to a healthy salary
increase, there was ample space to build a research collection of beetles, the
potential of four months of field work each year and a sabbatical every seven. As
an added bonus, this career upgrade did not require having to negotiate any
moving expenses as the university was located in Ottawa, just a short distance
from the Department of Agriculture. Scottish roots and sensibilities could remain
firmly planted, and life was good. Though slumped to 753, the Dow Jones was
poised to start climbing.
In the classrooms at Carleton, Henry taught various entomology and zoology
courses, especially those dealing with systematics. His most popular course was
his Evolution and Biogeography double-header. Taught to hundreds of under-
graduates and graduate students over the years, it combined the concepts of
evolutionary theory with a global overview of plant and animal distributions set
against a geological time scale. The laboratory sessions were often entertaining
slide-shows worthy of broadcast on a travel channel, but the term projects became
challenging exercises in reconstructing the evolutionary history of selected groups
of organisms. As a learning exercise, the course required integrating knowledge
from a wide array of disciplines. Many former students still remember it, praising
it as one of the most interesting and useful courses while cursing it as one of the
most difficult courses that they took at Carleton.
During his tenure at Carleton, Henry carried out extensive field work in
Australia and Latin America. As a visiting scientist in Australia, he received
logistic support from the CSIRO, including Export Permit #001, the first permit
issued for the scientific export of insects. Like many first editions, the issuers of
this document neglected to put an expiration date on it, much to the delight of the
recipient, giving him a license to collect indefinitely. In the course of a half-dozen
trips between 1972 and 1989, Henry and Anne covered much of the continent,
gathering thousands of specimens, countless new species, and many new friends.
They invested over two years of time in Australia and left behind thousands of
mounds of freshly aerated soil and tons of battered and beaten foliage. More
importantly, they left behind holotypes of all of their new species, deposited in the
Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC). Interspersed with Australian field
work, Henry made collecting trips to other areas of the world. One of his more
painful trips was a 1974 visit to New Guinea with Bert Nesbitt and S. B. Peck. In
the pursuit of science, if not an actual beetle, he broke his ankle. New Guinea at
the time, thankfully, did not have tabloid newspapers nor paparazzi. Otherwise he
would have faced the indignity of headlines like ‘‘Henry Howden Broke!’’ and the
Dow Jones could have bottomed-out even worse than its 12-year low of 577.60.
Though his injury slowed him down, he still managed to collect some interesting
specimens close to camp. ‘‘Interesting’’ meaning that they were taxa not found in
his backyard in Canada, and once collected, should be worth something to
someone. His Scottish genes came through the mishap unscathed.
Not content to limit his teaching within the brick and mortar of classrooms,
Henry organized several large expeditions to the Amazon, bringing groups of 50
students and staff to Leticia, Colombia. Coordinating a field trip of 5–10 people
can be a challenge at the best of times, but coordinating 50 people must be like
 COLEOPTERISTS SOCIETY MONOGRAPH NUMBER 5, 2006 17

herding cats. Henry did this not once but several times. He must have been one
heck of a drill instructor back in Texas. For many of the participants, which also
included a few artists and photographers, these trips were their first exposure to
the humid tropics. Though not all would pursue careers in biology, the adventure
of carrying out research projects or assisting others with field work in such exotic
locales would be a memorable experience. It would also leave Henry with
memories of graduate students who ignored his advice and traveled with blue
jeans and long hair. He would later have to retrieve them from the clutches of
Colombian authorities after explaining in his colorful ‘‘Spanglish’’ that they were
biology students and not dangerous hippies. Some of the male students may have
been offered free hair-cuts.
Habits and Behavior. Henry Howden was obviously bitten by the collecting bug at
an early age. From his earliest days of collecting butterflies and moths to his life-
long quest for beetles, he’s maintained a keen enthusiasm for discovering new and
unusual specimens. Students and colleagues who’ve had the good fortune to
spend time with him in the field can attest to his fairness and generosity when it
comes to sharing both knowledge and specimens. His passion for scarabs,
especially dung beetles, was eloquently summed up in the words of George Ball as
an ‘‘intense interest in and enthusiasm for the heavily armored, bumbling, horned
monsters with disgusting alimentary habits, that are included in the Scarabaei-
nae’’ (Quaestiones Entomologicae 16: 678). In addition to scarabs, he has
accumulated extensive holdings of buprestids, cerambycids, histerids, nitidulids,
and a host of other families including tiger beetles, a group that he admits to
collecting much like postage stamps. Stamp collecting is also a hobby that he has
enjoyed for many years, exchanging material (especially receiving ‘‘official
stamps’’) with other philatelic-minded coleopterists like J. A. Chemsak, S.
Endrödi, H. B. Leach, E. G. Linsley, and D. R. Whitehead.
Henry Howden was never one to blindly follow the dictates of administration.
When he purchased an IBM Presidential typewriter to produce camera-ready
manuscripts for the American Entomological Institute (which required pro-
portional-spacing text), he was informed that only the university president could
possess a Presidential typewriter. He could not. Instead of disposing of the
offending device, he stored it at home when it wasn’t being smuggled into the
university for clandestine service. Like a good Scotsman, he saw no need to
dispose of a perfectly good piece of equipment just because somebody thought it
had been wrongly named. Likewise, he didn’t retire from the university at the
suggested age of 65 but rather kept teaching until he was 70. Only then did he
retire from teaching and migrate his research over to the Canadian Museum of
Nature where he and Anne had been donating their collections. No discussion of
Henry’s behavior would be complete without discussion of collections, because
they have been a focal point of his waking life.
Much of the insect material that Henry collected in the 1950s was deposited in
the Canadian National Collection (CNC) when he was first hired by the
Department of Agriculture. During his ten years at Agriculture, he expanded the
scarab holdings from 53 to over 500 drawers of pinned specimens. This doesn’t
include material of other beetle groups, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, and other
orders that he collected for colleagues at the CNC. Once he started at Carleton
University, he began building the modern H. & A. Howden collection. As this
collection grew, he looked towards Agriculture and the CNC as the logical
repository for this material, since the university had no interest nor mandate for
the preservation of collections. After happily donating material for a number of
18 COLEOPTERISTS SOCIETY MONOGRAPH NUMBER 5, 2006

years, a bureaucratic change at Agriculture resulted in the appointment of a new

manager who actively discouraged the acceptance of non-native insects into the
CNC, especially from university staff and students. Henry’s response was to offer
his collection elsewhere, which ultimately led to the creation of an entomology
collection within the National Museums of Canada. With donations of specimens
and a sizeable cash endowment, the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) became
a beneficiary of the Howden generosity and was well on its way to building
a world-class beetle collection by the time Agriculture was rid of its myopic
managers. Aside from their value in research, access to voucher specimens of
exotic, non-native species is one of the best methods for the rapid identification of
invasive alien species, and the CNC’s loss on the scarab and weevil front has
become the CMN’s strength.
Remarks. Over a 55 year span, Henry F. Howden published 179 research papers
totaling 3,275 pages (pp. 205–213 herein). That works out to 3.2 publications and
nearly 60 printed pages per year. When he started working on Australian
geotrupines there were 73 described species. After his 10th publication on the
group, he increased that total to 166 species. Of the hundreds of new taxa that he
has described, few have been synonymized by subsequent workers. He has helped
educate several thousand undergraduate students; supervised 9 M.Sc. and 10
Ph.D. degrees; served as an advisor for 7 additional graduate students; and
supervised 20 undergraduate honors students, many of whom went on to careers
in teaching and research. He has served as Chairman of Section A, Entomological
Society of America (1965) and Vice-President of the CanaColl Foundation (1976–
2000); elected President of the Coleopterists Society twice (1968 and 1969); elected
Fellow, Entomological Society of Canada (1985); received a Scholarly Achieve-
ment Award from Carleton University (1987) and a Certificate of Merit from the
National Museums of Canada (1988); named an Honorary Member, Institute of
Ecology, Xalapa Mexico (1998) and an Honorary Member of the Coleopterists
Society (2003); and was recently elected Fellow of the Entomological Society of
America (2005).
He’s tracked the markets closely, watching the Dow break a thousand in 1972,
surpass 4700 on his retirement in 1995, and hit an all-time high of 11,722.98 in
January 2000. He’s invested wisely in finance, field work, and friendship over the
decades, building up vast reserves of capital, Coleoptera, and camaraderie. He’s
managed to make a career out of doing the things he likes best (collecting,
traveling, reading, and teaching), and, in return, has helped many aspiring
biologists and entomologists gain the skills that they needed to develop their own
careers (even if one of them, moi, did show up unannounced on his driveway one
auspicious August 19th). In a nutshell, he’s shifted the World towards a deeper
and richer appreciation of the Scarabaeoidea. These are the evolutionary signs of
a successful man.
It’s often said that behind every successful man, there is a hard working
woman. That’s very true in Anne’s case, except that she realized early on that
‘‘you don’t get many good beetles trailing behind anyone’’. So she has been right
beside ‘‘Harry’’, swinging her own net, wielding her own beating sheet, and
publishing her own papers on the taxonomy and biology of weevils. Henry would
not have wanted it any other way!