Charles Alexander Fleming, 9 September 1916 - 11 September 1987

Abstract

Charles Fleming, who died on 11 September 1987, was unusual among New Zealand scientists in several respects. At a time when most New Zealand scientists and academics felt the need to work and study overseas, and when ‘overseas experience’ almost had the value and status of a further academic qualification, Fleming had the confidence to remain in the small and less authoritative New Zealand scientific community and focus his studies on the past and present of the unique flora and fauna of this part of the world. Although he travelled to many scientific meetings overseas, especially in the Pacific region, he studied and worked almost entirely in New Zealand and the smaller islands of the south west Pacific. Secondly, he was a person of significant personal financial means, a most unusual circumstance among New Zealand scientists. This meant that when important career decisions had to be made, he was free to choose the path that interested him most, rather than the most remunerative one. Thirdly, in the breadth of his scientific interests and contributions he compares with the great leaders of 19th-century science in New Zealand such as James Hector, F.R.S., and F. W. Hutton, F.R.S., who laid the foundations of New Zealand geology, botany and zoology. His interests spanned at least four of the Royal Society sectional committees. They included: oceanography, biostratigraphy and structural geology, especially as they relate to the geological history of the South West Pacific; plant ecology and paleobotany in relation to the history of floras; the New Zealand avifauna and marine mollusca; the phylogeny of New Zealand Cicadidae (Homoptera); and evolutionary mechanisms especially in relation to geographic isolation. With the death of Charles Fleming there is virtually no one left in New Zealand with such affinities to the 19th-century science of Darwin’s era.