"I think I shall go abroad and hunt adventure."

Edward Harrison Taylor (1889-1978)

When young Edward Harrison Taylor left Maysville, Missouri, to attend the University of Kansas in 1908, he brought his interest in reptiles with him. He boarded at the Lawrence home of the Kansas gover­nor, where his water snake pets were not immediately welcome. But when a houseguest, Theodore Roosevelt, expressed great interest in the snakes, the terrarium of serpents gained new status in the governor's household.

Graduating early from KU, Ed Taylor proclaimed, "I think I shall go abroad and hunt adventure," mostly in disdain of joining the ranks of common job-hunters. A few days later, a notice of civil service posi­tions in the Philippines appeared and Ed Taylor breezed through examina­tions to find himself aboard ship and Manila-bound.

His first assignment was to estab­lish a boarding school in a remote area for children from headhunting tribes. With the help of one water buffalo and a passel of enthusiastic youngsters, he cleared a forest, built a school dormitory, and offered a curriculum of corn planting and base­ball.

Later assignments included district supervisor, the chief of fisheries in the Philippines and finally the direc­tor of the Bureau of Science.

In the midst of these duties, Ed Taylor took every opportunity to explore mountain peaks, remote jun­gle trails, and outlying islands, al­ways with a snake bag tucked under his belt. His ability to survive in the jungle became legendary, and his exploration of treetop flora and re­mote regions secured many speci­mens new to science.

When Taylor returned to the United States and to KU, he did not abandon this love of fieldwork and travel. In teaching comparative anat­omy or guiding graduate research, his attention to detail and his ability in storytelling were well known. He took every opportunity to return to the field for collecting and research. His landmark treatise on the lizard group Eumeces was followed by lengthy field surveys of the reptiles and amphibians of Mexico, Costa Rica, and Thailand.

Ultimately, his research totaled some 15,000 pages of scientific pub­lication that established seven new families, twenty-five new genera and over 500 new species. "In sheer bulk alone it outweighs anything pro­duced by any other herpetologist who ever lived," appraises Hobart M. Smith, a renowned former stu­dent and colleague.

On a Philippine collecting trip, Taylor had collected earthworms for a colleague, only to notice that one was not an earthworm, but a new species of burrowing amphibian in the group called caecilians. The last major effort in his career was a revision of these caecilians, including descriptions of a large number of new species.

At age eighty-nine in 1978, Pro­fessor Taylor listened to the accounts of a younger herpetologist just re­turned from South America. "Oh, how my feet itch to go into the field," he lamented.