George Albert Boulenger

Biographical Background

He was the only child of Gustave Boulenger, a Belgian public notary, and Juliette Piérart de Valenciennes.  After graduating in 1876 from the Free University in Brussels with a degree in natural sciences, he started working at the Museum of Natural History of Brussels as an assistant naturalist studying amphibians, reptiles, and fishes.  Given the lack of appropriate collections of both specimens and well-stocked libraries in Belgium, Boulenger made frequent visits to the Musée National d’Hirotoire Naturelle in Paris and the British Museum in London.

This young man must have greatly impressed his colleagues, because by 1880, at the age of 22, Boulenger was invited to work at the British Museum in London by one of the foremost zoologists of the time, Dr. Albert Günther.  The idea was to give Boulenger the responsibility of preparing a new catalog of amphibians in the national collection.  Since a position in the British Museum meant that he had to be a civil servant of the British Empire, he became a naturalized British subject.  In 1882, he was appointed first-class assistant in the Department of Zoology, a position that he held until his retirement in 1920.

Unlike many other naturalists, Boulenger switched specialties at the peak of his career.  For reasons that nobody understands, right after his retirement from the British Museum, Boulenger decided to immerse himself in the study of roses.  By the time of his death in 1937, he had published 34 papers on botanical subjects and two volumes on the roses of Europe.

Boulenger was also an unusual character.  He was incredibly methodical and had an amazing memory that enabled him to remember every specimen and scientific name he ever saw.  He also had extraordinary powers of writing off the top of his head.  He seldom made a second draft of anything he wrote and his manuscripts showed but few corrections.  They went straight to the publisher.  They were never typed and he never employed a typist.

An austere man, Boulenger played the violin and loved the theater, particularly the operetta.  French and English were his mother tongues but he could speak German and was able to read Spanish and Italian and a bit of Russian.  He had working knowledge of both Greek and Latin.

He was known as a kind man, especially toward children, who were fascinated with the fact that a chimp shared his family house with his wife and three sons when he lived in London.

Despite all his interests, Boulenger was first and foremost a scientist.  By the time of his retirement in 1921, Boulenger had published 877 papers totaling more than 5,000 pages, as well as 19 monographs on fishes, amphibians, and reptiles.  The list of his publications and its index of species took 77 printed pages.  He described 1,096 species of fish, 556 species of amphibians, and 872 species of reptiles.  He was famous for his monographs on amphibians, lizards and other reptiles and fishes as well as for his monographs on the fishes of Africa.  His scientific contributions were recognized all over the world.  Boulenger was a member and distinguished officer of scientific societies in Europe and the United States. In 1935, the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists elected him as its first honorary member, and in 1937, Belgium conferred him the Order of Leopold, the highest honor awarded to a civilian.

He was considered the world’s expert on African freshwater fishes despite the fact he had never been to Africa.  Boulenger’s only previous stint as researcher of cave animals had been a short note on the eye development of the cave salamander Proteus (Boulenger 1893).

Work on Hypogean Fishes

In 1897 King Leopold II of Belgium started to recruit naturalists for a commission in charge of the creation of the Congo museum.  Despite the fact that he was living in London, Boulenger was named chairman. This is when he put his extraordinary energy and productivity into the study of the freshwater fishes of Africa.  He encouraged travelers and residents in various parts of Africa to send home specimens.  Strange creatures like the Okapi (an odd looking horse-like jungle animal), mountain gorillas, and limbless frogs, had been celebrated by the scientific community.

Although already retired as a zoologist, Boulenger received in 1921 a strange fish specimen from Congo.  It was eyeless and lacked pigmentation.  He was quick to recognize that this was something nobody had seen before.  It was not closely related to any extant epigean (eyed, surface) species of Africa.  Despite that he had said that he would not work on fishes, amphibians, or reptiles again, he decided to write a brief paper describing this new species of cave fish, the first ever described from Africa.  He called it Caecobarbus geertsii, from caeco = blind, barbus = barb, and geertsii, honoring a mysterious person, M. Geerts, who provided him with the specimen.  Today it is known as the Congo or African blind barb.  Boulenger, whose only previous stint as researcher of cave animals had been a 1893 short note on the eye development of the cave salamander Proteus, published his descriptions in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature.

While today Boulenger is recognized as the scientific discoverer of this species, the fact is that others were the true discoverers of the tiny cave fish.  For one thing, Boulenger had never been to Africa!  So, who was the true discoverer of this cave biological relic?  Here is when the story becomes as obscure as the "dark continent" from which it came.  Details are sketchy and holes in the story are big, but here is what we know.

In 1917, during the dry season, a party of amateur cave explorers penetrated 500 meters into a limestone cave situated about 700 meters above sea level.  This cave was located in Lower Belgian Congo near Thysville (today Kanka near Mbanza-Ngungu, 5^o 18' S 14^o 50'E), and there they found a blind and depigmented cave fish.  One of those amateur explorers, M. Geerts, waited until after the end of World War I, when it was safe for him to go back to Belgium, where he carried with him a few specimens of this bizarre fish.  The choice of handling this specimen for its study was easy; after all Boulenger was not only the foremost specialist on African fishes of the time, but also he was a Belgian.  Boulenger, gratefully, and following a common practice among naturalists, named the species after the person who had brought it to him in the paper describing this new genus and species in 1921. Too bad that we can not be more grateful toward M. Geerts than Boulenger himself.  The fact of the matter is that nobody seems to know anything about this mysterious M. Geerts except for the fact that he was not a professional scientist.

It seems that in 1915, two years before the fish had been obtained by Geerts, another little known explorer, M. Delporte, may have actually been the first European to see this fish.  There was also a certain E. Randour who discovered in the 1920's the same fish in other caves of the same area.  All what we know is that he wrote a little known, and difficult to acquire from any American library, booklet on the Congo.

Soon this extraordinary fish became a celebrity in the world of cave fish research. Being easy to transport alive, many European scientists started to work on this species.  It became so famous that in May 1951, it was exhibited at the New York Aquarium (Romero and Benz 2000).