Edvard Vainio

Edvard August Vainio (born Edvard Lang; 5 August 185314 May 1929) was a Finnish lichenologist. His early works on the lichens of Lapland, his three-volume monograph on the lichen genus ''Cladonia'', and, in particular, his study of the classification and form and structure of lichens in Brazil, made Vainio renowned internationally in the field of lichenology.

Young Vainio's friendship with university student Johan Petter Norrlin, who was nearly eleven years older, helped him develop an impressive knowledge of the local cryptogams (ferns, mosses, algae, and fungi, including lichens) and afforded him ample opportunity to hone his collection and identification techniques at an early age. It was through this association that Vainio met Norrlin's teacher, the prominent lichenologist William Nylander, who supported his early botanical efforts. Vainio's earliest works dealt with phytogeography—elucidating and enumerating the local flora—and are considered the earliest publications on phytogeography in the Finnish language. In these early publications he demonstrated an attention to detail and thoroughness that would become characteristic of his later work.

After graduating from the University of Helsinki in 1880, Vainio became a docent, meaning he was qualified to teach academically, but without a regular salary. Despite his scientific successes and the international recognition he gained through his research, he never obtained a permanent position in this university. This was a result, he said, of his intense Finnish nationalism and desire to promote the use of the Finnish language in academia during a time of language strife, when Latin dominated the scientific literature, and Swedish was the predominant language of administration and education. Disillusioned with his prospects for permanent academic employment, and faced with the reality of having to provide for his family, he was obliged to accept a position with the Russian censorship authority, which led to his ostracism by the Finnish scientific community.

Vainio described about 1700 new taxa, and published more than 100 scientific works. He made significant scientific collections of lichens, and, as a result of his many years of work as herbarium curator at both the University of Helsinki, and later the University of Turku, he catalogued and processed other collections from all over the world, including the Arctic and Antarctica. Because of the significance of his works on lichens in the tropics and other locales, he has been called the Father of Brazilian lichenology and the Grand Old Man of lichenology.

Early life

Edvard Lang was born on 5 August 1853 in Pieksämäki in the eastern Grand Duchy of Finland, part of the Russian Empire. Brought up in a poor home, he was one of several children of bailiff Carl Johan Lang and his wife Adolfina Polén. Edvard's early interest in natural history was manifested in his interest in flowers and his mineral collection; his favourite flower was the marsh willowherb (''Epilobium palustre''). His eldest brother, , was also an avid naturalist, and would later become a well-known legal scholar. In the early 1860s, the family relocated to the municipality of Hollola near Lake Vesijärvi in southern Finland due to his father's work, settling in a farm near the neighbouring municipality of Asikkala. Here Edvard met Johan Petter Norrlin, the son of a neighbour. At the time, Norrlin, who was 11 years his senior, was a university student studying phytogeography, or the geographical distribution of plant species. Norrlin would marry Lang's sister in 1873.

Norrlin had become interested in cryptogams after hearing university lectures given by the well-known lichenologist William Nylander at the Imperial Alexander University (today known as the University of Helsinki), and he became Nylander's student. Norrlin developed an expertise in the local cryptogam flora, particularly the lichens, which are quite diverse in Finland. Lang accompanied and assisted him during field trips in the summers of 1868 and 1869 in the vicinity of Lake Vesijärvi, eagerly absorbing and accumulating knowledge. When Norrlin published ''Beiträge zur Flora des südöstlichen Tavastlands'' ("Writings on the flora of south-eastern Tavastia Province") in 1870, he credited Lang—at the time still a schoolboy—for numerous and valuable contributions to his work.

Education

Lang graduated from the in Jyväskylä in 1870. He began his studies at the Imperial Alexander University the same year, and under the guidance of Norrlin studied botany, phytogeography, and lichenology. As a young student, in 1871, Lang was granted membership in the Societas pro Fauna et Flora Fennica (Finnish Association for Science and Flora), which is the oldest scientific society in Finland. Lang was particularly skilled at identifying and collecting specimens in the field. During the summers of 1873 and 1874 he collected 472 different lichen species from the parishes of Luhanka and Korpilahti in Central Finland, and in spring of the following year, he recorded 324 species in the vicinity of Vyborg. In one of Nylander's publications, eleven new species were described based on the collections of "E. Lang". A grateful Nylander ordered and sent Lang a microscope in the summer of 1874 to help him with his botanical studies. In letters between Norrlin and Nylander, the latter praised Lang's collecting ability, writing "He is a sharp and fit collector of lichens. With a little work and the help of a decent microscope, he will probably soon surpass everyone else in the North, where no one is better than he in this respect." Lang received his Candidate of Philosophy in 1874 and began work on his licentiate degree.

During his time as a graduate student, Vainio, who had by now given up his original surname, published two works on the cryptogams of Finland: ''Lichenes in viciniis Viburgi observati'' ("Lichens observed in the vicinity of Viburg") (1878) and ''Florula Tavastiae orientalis'' ("Flora of east Tavastia") (1878), which dealt with the results of his collecting excursions. In these publications, Vainio analysed and identified the lichen material he collected from the Vyborg region, including new species observations, without assistance from Norrlin or Nylander. Another early publication, ''Adjumenta ad Lichenographiam Lapponiae fennicae atque Fenniae borealis'' ("Adjustments to the lichens of Finnish Lapland and northern Finland"; published in two parts in 1881 and 1883) was based on material he had collected in 1875 and 1877 in desolate locations near the border of the Grand Duchy of Finland and Russia, including North Karelia, Kainuu, Koillismaa, eastern Lapland, and Russian Karelia. Vainio included 626 species in this publication, of which 70 were new to science. He had botanical explorations in Kuusamo and along the Paatsjoki River, but his time on the Russian side of the border was cut short because of lack of funding.

In these works—considered the earliest publications on phytogeography in the Finnish language—Vainio meticulously catalogued the moisture, light, and soil conditions of the places where he collected, and defined terms that would eventually become standard terminology in the field. Vainio's work has been described as ahead of its time, because he not only described plant communities but also identified ecological factors that increased or decreased the dominance of different kinds of vegetation and distributional limits for different species. As noted by Adolf Hugo Magnusson in his 1930 obituary of Vainio, the characteristics that would represent his later work were evident already in these early publications:

Nylander, however, disliked Vainio's use of Finnish as the language of his publications and this marked the start of a downward turn in their professional relationship. In a letter to Norrlin (dated 20 March 1876), he wrote

In 1880, Vainio defended his dissertation for his licentiate. According to the practice of the time, this qualified him as a docent and gave him teaching rights at the University of Helsinki, although there was no guarantee of a regular salary. His thesis was a study of the phylogeny (evolutionary relationships) of ''Cladonia'', a large and widespread genus of fruticose lichens that includes the reindeer lichen and British soldiers lichen species. Titled ''Tutkimus Cladoniain phylogenetillisestä kehityksestä'' ("An Investigation on the Phylogenetic Development of the Cladoniae"), this work was the first dissertation on natural science that was published in the Finnish language. According to his colleague and biographer Kaarlo Linkola, "this paper of 62 printed pages was sensational on account of its modern theme, as well as its youthful freshness and its originality". Vainio supported the theory of evolution in his work, and proposed that the science of systematics required an examination of phylogeny, rather than mechanical categorization based on sometimes superficial characters. At the same time, Vainio's research contradicted some of Nylander's previous work by identifying flaws in the way he defined species in ''Cladonia''. In this work, Vainio maintained that the theory of evolution had disrupted the foundations of taxonomy to such an extent that it essentially had to be rebuilt. Such a radical outlook was viewed with some reservation by Johan Reinhold Sahlberg (docent in entomology) and Sextus Otto Lindberg (Professor of Botany), who were charged with assessing Vainio's work. In the end, however, they noted Vainio's detailed valuable morphological investigations and recommended that the dissertation be approved.

Career

During his undergraduate days, Vainio took on several temporary positions to support himself. These included work as a translator of Swedish and Finnish for the Uusimaa Provincial Government in 1874; teaching natural history, physics, and gymnastics at a school (Viipurin Realikoulu) in Vyborg in 1875; and, from 1879 to 1881, teaching at the . In 1880, when Vainio qualified to become a docent at the University of Helsinki, he started lecturing on botany. These were the first botany courses given in the Finnish language; Swedish continued to be the primary language for instruction at the University until 1918. His courses consisted of lessons in microscopy, which were mostly given in his home, or on field trips to hunt for cryptogams. Even during his docentship, Vainio continued to work additional modest jobs. He taught botany at the horticultural school (1878–1882), and taught natural sciences at the Swedish Private Lyceum (1879–1882), the Swedish Real Lyceum (1881–1884), the Finnish Primary School (1882–1884), the Finnish Girls' School (1882–1884) and the Finnish Graduate School (1882–1884). He did not enjoy teaching, and is said to have had difficulties in maintaining discipline in his classrooms.

Work abroad

Early in his career, with the help of grants from the university, Vainio made several scientific expeditions abroad. In 1880, accompanying Swedish physician and explorer , he investigated the eastern slopes of the Middle Urals in western Siberia. These included the Konda River area extending from the river Irtysh to Lake Satyga. The results of this botanical excursion were not published until almost 50 years later. In 1882, he took trips to Berlin and Rostock to botanical museums and herbaria to study the ''Cladonia'' specimens located there; and in 1884–1885 to botanical museums in Moscow, Vienna, Geneva, Paris, and London. It was during a second trip to Paris in 1889–1890 that he would meet his future wife.

Vainio was one of the first European lichenologists to perform field work in the tropics. After being granted a stipend from the University, in 1885 Vainio undertook a year-long expedition to Brazil, collecting primarily lichens in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro and in Minas Gerais. He spent some time initially in Sítio (now known as Antônio Carlos), and then in Lafayette (now Conselheiro Lafaiete). Many of his type specimens were collected from these locations. He wrote favourably of the conditions there: "Sítio was a very convenient place for my work: it offered opportunities to study the plant life in the forests as well as in the grasslands. The dryness of the air was also favorable for getting my specimens properly (pressed) and dried." In Rio de Janeiro, Vainio met the French botanist, and later landscape designer for Brazilian royalty, Auguste François Marie Glaziou, who advised him on possible travel routes. It was also during this initial part of the trip that he met a French naturalist named Germain, with whom he had several collecting excursions. Germain advised Vainio against travelling via his originally intended route, and convinced him instead to visit the biodiverse , north of Ouro Branco. It was here that the was located, a monastery where Germain himself had stayed, and which welcomed scientists as guests. Some of the monks residing there were interested in science and collected insects and plants. The monastery had a large library, including works on the local flora, such as Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius' influential work ''Flora Brasiliensis''. The French entomologist Pierre-Émile Gounelle stayed at the monastery while Vainio was there, and some of their collecting work was done together.

Vainio's tools for fieldwork in Brazil included a knife, hammer, chisel, paper, and a bag. He also carried a shotgun for protection against jaguars. In one of his later collecting trips in the Caraça Mountains, Vainio ventured out alone to the highest peak of the eastern mountain ranges, the —. Because of his relatively poor knowledge of the terrain, he misjudged the distances involved as well as the amount of available daylight. He ended up spending a night in a wet, sandfly-infested cave without food, water, or a way to make fire. It was only the next morning he was able to find a stream to quench his extreme thirst, and not until the afternoon, when, exhausted, he eventually found his way back to the monastery. During his week-long recovery, one of the monks had to extract sandfly larvae from large bulges on the back of his neck. By the end of his time in Caraça, he had collected a large volume of specimens. Vainio went on to Rio de Janeiro, making excursions to coastal areas such as Niterói, the Tijuca mountains, and the Sepetiba region. With the permission of museum director Ladislau de Souza Mello Netto, Vainio studied at the National Museum of Brazil. Vainio returned from Brazil with about 1600 samples packed in five large crates. He worked with this material in Helsinki for the next few years; the material he collected was so abundant that during a few months of study in Paris during 1889–1890, he issued the exsiccata "Lichenes brasilienses exsiccati", a set of 1593 dried herbarium specimen units distributed in eight copies.

Work in Finland

As well as his scholarly work published later, Vainio published in Finnish a popular account of his travels in Brazil, ''Matkustus Brasiliassa. Kuvaus luonnosta ja kansoista Brasiliassa'' ("Travels in Brazil. A Description of Nature and Travels in Brazil") (1888). This book combines a description of his travel adventures with a folkloric account of Brazil, its flora and fauna, and its inhabitants. Vainio does not indicate in this book nor in his later scholarly work the reason for visiting Brazil in the first place. German botanist Fritz Mattick suggests that the idea may have originated from the fact that several botanists from the Nordic countries had lived in the interior of Minas Gerais, including Danish naturalist Peter Wilhelm Lund, who lived in Lagoa Santa and made palaeontological discoveries in the nearby limestone caves; and Danish botanists Peter Clausen and his assistant Eugenius Warming. ''Cladonia'' specimens that were collected by Warming are mentioned in Vainio's monograph.

In 1887, Vainio published the first of his three-volume monograph on ''Cladonia'', titled ''Monographia Cladoniarum universalis'' ("Universal Monograph on Cladonia"); the final volume was published in 1897. This was an extensive work written in Latin, totalling 1277 pages, on all aspects of this group of lichens. It included descriptions of species old and new, analysis of species synonymy, distribution records, and detailed analysis of the structure and development of the Cladoniae. The publication of just the first volume had already secured Vainio's reputation as a prominent lichenologist. This major work was later judged to be the best work during this era in the field of lichen research. As an indication of the accuracy and reliability of Vainio's work, a 1998 study showed that of the 18 new ''Cladonia'' species he described from Brazil a century before, 16 were still considered valid species.

Vainio also published several works based on analysis of collections made by others. For example, Vainio processed and identified lichens collected from tropical Africa by explorers and botanists Friedrich Welwitsch and Hans Schinz. He assumed responsibility for the European collections of Hungarian lichenologist Hugó Lojka after he died at a relatively young age. In 1899, after the death of William Nylander, his collections were transferred from Paris to the University of Helsinki, where it was Vainio's responsibility to arrange and catalogue them: they contained a total of 51,066 specimens. Although his relationship with the university was strained at the time, there was no-one else qualified for the job. Vainio published works based on collections he was sent from locations such as Puerto Rico, Japan, Thailand, Tahiti, and Trinidad.

In some instances, his studies of material sent to him by other scientists greatly advanced the knowledge of the local flora from where they were sent. For example, Vainio was sent for identification the collections of Portuguese botanist and army doctor , who made them as part of a military campaign in Mozambique during 1916–1917. Vainio's results were published posthumously; of the 138 taxa he identified, about half were previously unknown to science. In another instance, Vainio identified the lichens collected by Ernst Almquist from the ''Vega'' Expedition of 1878–1880 through the Arctic coast of Eurasia; about 100 species were previously unknown. As a result of scientific investigations initiated by the Philippine Organic Act of 1902, American and Filipino botanists surveyed the flora of the Philippines, gathering a large amount of lichens in the process. This material was organised by Elmer Drew Merrill who sent it to Vainio for identification. This collaboration ultimately resulted in almost 500 pages of text over four publications from 1909 to 1923. Vainio described 92 genera and 680 species; almost two-thirds of the species were previously unknown. Before these publications, only about 30 lichen species had been documented in the country.

Application for professorship

As the culmination of his studies in Brazil, in 1890 Vainio published ''Étude sur la classification naturelle et la morphologie des lichens du Brésil'' ("Study on the natural classification and the morphology of the lichens of Brazil") in Latin with an introduction in French. This 526-page work dealt with 516 species, of which 240 were new to science. The Brazilian taxa were distributed amongst 78 genera (12 of which were described as new), the most well-represented of which included ''Lecidea'' (68 species), ''Graphis'' (43), ''Parmelia'' (39), ''Lecanora'' (33), ''Arthonia'' (25), and ''Buellia'' (19). The genus ''Cladonia'' was not included, as he reserved it for his monograph on the subject. Vainio discussed the general theory of lichens in the introduction of his work, supporting Simon Schwendener's then-controversial theory that lichens were the result of a symbiotic union between fungus and alga. Vainio advocated including the lichens in the general classification of the fungi. He argued that lichens are a polyphyletic group, with only one uniting characteristic—the symbiosis—distinguishing them from the ascomycetes and other fungi.

Vainio's work was intended to be a thesis submission for the post of Associate Professor at the University of Helsinki, a position he applied for in writing in the autumn of 1888. His early mentor Norrlin had obtained a similar position in 1878, which perhaps inspired Vainio to make the application. Because the department Chair, Sextus Otto Lindberg, did not trust his Finnish-language skills sufficiently to be able to judge the merits of Vainio's work, other opinions were sought, and so in addition to William Nylander, Theodor Magnus Fries and Johann Müller were recruited.

Most prominent contemporary lichenologists, including Müller and Nylander, disagreed with the so-called "Schwendenerian hypothesis" and the dual nature of lichens. Since they still subscribed to the belief that lichens were a plant group—rather than the fungus/alga symbiosis they are now known to be—they thought that Vainio's proposal to classify lichens with fungi was ridiculous. Müller in particular published two articles that were highly critical of Vainio's conclusions in ''Études Brésil''. Vainio's relationship with Nylander had become strained since their successful collaborations years before. Nylander, in previous correspondence with Norrlin, expressed doubts about Vainio's decision to publish his early scientific works in Finnish instead of Latin, which was the norm in the international scientific community. He also questioned Lang's decision to change his name, writing "A most curious matter is also the disappearance of Mr Lang and the birth of Mr Wainio instead. This is a matter that may be possible and explainable in Finland (and unfortunate is that such is the situation) but in the common practical world, here in the logical humanity, such a thing is impossible even to mention without incurably injuring the person concerned." Vainio, in correspondence with Johann Müller in 1889, wrote "it is perhaps necessary that the knowledge of my thesis remains between us, because there are people who lay very peculiar intrigues to prevent me from the professorship. Nylander has taken a stand as a very unscrupulous enemy against me and has taken up a very scandalous intrigue".

Nylander criticised and dismissed Vainio's thesis submission, arguing it had little scientific value. In contrast, Fries praised Vainio's work, and described him as one of the most competent contemporary lichenologists. Johann Müller disagreed with most of Vainio's general conclusions, and thought that chemical reactions, a characteristic that Vainio emphasised, have only a physiological, not taxonomical, value. Although Müller was public about his criticisms of Vainio's work, he did acknowledge his careful working method and anticipated that Vainio, "after return from wrong paths", would use his excellent observational skills in a systematically correct way in future research. German lichenologist Ferdinand Christian Gustav Arnold, who was present at Vainio's public thesis defence, introduced himself as a supporter of Schwendener's theory, and indicated that Vainio's work was the first to create a consistent system for classification.

Vainio did not receive the associate professorship for which he applied; the Department of Natural Sciences voted 4 to 3 against his application. Before an official announcement could even be drafted, Sextus Otto Lindberg died, leaving vacant the position of Professor of Botany. This gave Vainio the opportunity to apply for this job, for which he competed with the two other docents: Fredrik Elfving and Oswald Kairamo. The Department ranked him third in order of merit. Elfving was given the position; he later became known for his erroneous views on the nature of photobiont