John Samuel Budgett (16 June 1872 – 19 January 1904) was a British zoologist and embryologist. He spent most of his short career on the genus Polypterus (bichir). This is found in the lakes, river margins, swamps, and floodplains of tropical central and western Africa and the Nile River system. Zoologists at the time wondered whether it was a bony fish, a cartilaginous fish, a lungfish or a primitive amphibian. Forty years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, zoologists were seeking to map the history of species and this primitive animal was a key part of the map. To find its place there, it was necessary to observe juvenile Polypterus in the wild. It took Budgett four African expeditions but in the end he succeeded in doing so.
However, the long periods spent in swampy, mosquito-ridden places left him debilitated with malaria and he died of blackwater fever shortly after his return to England. This happened on the very day that he was supposed to deliver a lecture on his work to the Zoological Society of London. He did not even have time to write a report. However he did leave a full set of drawings and specimens. It was left to his friend and colleague John Graham Kerr to interpret them and write the report.Shipley in Kerr (1907b)
Budgett's work remained the basis of understanding Polypterus development for almost 100 years.Hall (2001)
In an earlier expedition with Kerr to the Gran Chaco in central South America, Budgett did useful work on the amphibians of that area and discovered two species of a new genus Lepidobatrachus asper and Lepidobatrachus laevis. The genus was named Budgett's Frog in his honour.
Early life John Samuel Budgett was born at Redlands House, Bristol on 16 June 1872. His parents were William Henry Budgett (1827–1900) and Ann (née Lidgett, 1839–1936). When John was two they moved to Stoke House and Park, Stoke Bishop, Bristol. Post Code: BS9 1JP. This is now (2012) the home of Trinity College, Bristol. Confirmation of William’s ownership can be found on their website here , accessed 16 April 2012
William was a keen microscopist and served on the council of Bristol Museum. He was a keen amateur student of zoology and encouraged his children to study it. Professionally he was a partner in H.H. & S. Budgett, a successful wholesale grocery firm. Often he had professional scientists to stay during the summer and John was able to get informal tuition from them. Prominent among these was Professor William Kitchen Parker. For twenty-three consecutive years Parker spent a fortnight at Stoke Park. He was noted for his skill in preserving delicate skeletons, such as tadpoles and small birds, and he appears to have passed some of this skill to John.
Parker had studied the development of the skull and John began working on the topic himself, using his skills in dissection and specimen preparation. He designed a device for aligning serial sections that enabled him to construct models of the developing skull. He became an expert in this.
John was fascinated by the animal world, building aviaries and adapting outbuildings for a museum and a laboratory. The museum contained minute dissections, skeletons (including a cow and a deer) and stuffed animals all prepared by him and presented against natural-looking backgrounds. He visited Bristol Zoo often to obtain dead animals. He was skilled in keeping animals healthy, a good draftsman and watercolourist. In the summer he used to get up at 3 a.m. and walk miles to study animals and birds at dawn.
Budgett was educated first at a kindergarten, then Clifton College. However, he had to leave the College at about fourteen owing to severe headaches caused by an accident. He continued his studies with private tutors before entering University College, Bristol. There he received help in the formal study of zoology but much of his practical skill was self-taught.
Cambridge John went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1894. With his knowledge of natural history and strong testimonials, Budgett was elected to the Cambridge University Natural Sciences Club in his first year, a rare honour, for this club was limited to 12 undergraduates and a few graduate members. He was also elected a member of the Pitt Club at Cambridge.Kerr (1907b)
In August 1896, in his third and final year as an undergraduate, Budgett accompanied a newly graduated Kerr on an expedition to the Gran Chaco of South America.
In 1890 Kerr had travelled on an expedition mounted by the Argentinean Navy to survey the Pilcomayo River from the Paraná River north to the Bolivian border. He had conducted original research on Nautilus as an undergraduate and found that it provided a link between cephalopods and the rest of the molluscs. He had concluded that there was a general case to be made for studying the archaic species in a group to shed light on the group's evolution. It had been known since 1836 that the lungfish Lepidosiren lived in the Amazon so when Kerr learned in 1890 that a soldier had caught an eel-like fish he wondered whether it might be a lungfish.
During his subsequent study at Cambridge, Kerr had developed an ambition to make a study of Lepidosiren and this was the prime goal of the new expedition.
Budgett's principal study on the expedition was Anurous Amphibians or Batrachians. He collected many samples and made drawings and notes. He discovered a genus new to science: Lepidobatrachus with two species, Lepidobatrachus asper and Lepidobatrachus laevis and subsequently published a paper. Budgett (1899a) Lepidobatrachus was later given the common name Budgett's Frog. A third species has since been discovered.
Conditions were difficult. At times the Pilcomayo is 300 m wide, at times it is a trickle or stagnant swamp, marsh, lagoons, and dense tropical jungle. It has sand banks, confusing channels, and barriers of overturned and floating debris. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1897 Kerr and Budgett brought back to Cambridge a large supply of adult lungfish, with major embryonic and larval phases, so well preserved that the finest detail could be seen. Budgett's skill in manipulation and his knowledge of reagents played an important part in this success.
Arthur Shipley says, "It was a remarkable feat. To go straight as an arrow to the place where this almost unknown fish lives, to arrive at about the time of the breeding season, quite unknown before, and to collect and preserve all the delicate and varying stages of development within some seven months, placed the expedition at the first rank of Zoological exploration. But there is another factor which makes it even more remarkable, and that is the wonderful condition of the material when it arrived.... The difficulty in improvised rooms, worried by all sorts of insects, by torrential rains and occasionally floods, by inquisitive and highly suspicious natives...must have been enormous, but it was overcome. The success in this respect was certainly partly due to his [Budgett's] skill in manipulation and his peculiar knowledge of the use of reagents.".
Graduation On his return to Cambridge, Budgett had to catch up on his reading for Part II of the Natural Sciences Tripos (the Cambridge equivalent of Finals). He was not good at examinations but managed to get a Second. He then set to work on his South American frogs and completed his paper on them. He was a gifted draughtsman and watercolourist. The figures in his papers were both artistic and accurate.
Kerr had designed an apparatus to reconstruct solid figures from a series of microscopic drawings which have been obtained from sections or slices of the original biological structure. This might for example be the whole or part of an organ of an animal. The principle is that each section is drawn on to a piece of ground glass whose thickness bears a definite relation to the thickness of the section. Then the glass plates are placed in a bath of oil which eliminates the opacity of the ground glass and should provide a 3D image of the original structure. Budgett applied his ingenuity to make it easier to get the glasses in exactly the right position and his knowledge of reagents to choose an oil that allowed the maximum possible amount of light to pass.
Polypterus Budgett's ambition was to attack one of the great unsolved problems of zoology. Having watched Kerr work on lungfish in South America he resolved to work on two genera, in Africa which were then called Polypterus and Calamichthys. Calamichthys is now more usually called Erpetoichthys. These are the sole survivors of a vast group which flourished in the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic Periods. At that time little was known about them.
In 1861 Thomas Henry Huxley had created an order: Crossopterygii to house those extinct and extant animals that possessed lungs and fleshy pectoral fins with lepidotrichia. He had established a separate group (the tribe Polypterinus) within the order Crossopterygii for Polypterus and Calamichthys. He only had access to preserved specimens so his suggestion that Polypterus and Calamichthys belonged to Crossopterygii was only a theory. Work in the field was needed to test it. Francis Balfour and his Cambridge students had shown in the 1870s and early 1880s that embryology could help to answer questions about evolution. Perhaps the embryology of Polypterus, lungfish and related groups could help to establish which group of fishes had given rise to amphibians and hence to all tetrapods.
In 1895, Bashford Dean, a leading authority, wrote: "From their isolated position, these recent forms [Polypterus and Calamoichthys] become of extreme interest to the morphologist, and from the side of their development, when this comes to be studied, they are expected to throw the greatest light on the relations of the primitive Teleostome to the sharks and Dipnoans, on the one hand, and to the Ganoids on the other".Dean, B. (1895)
At the time nothing was known about juvenile Polypterus. This was partly because its habitat was remote and inhospitable and partly because of recurring warfare until the late 1890s. Budgett worked to fill this gap for five years and eventually succeeded, but only at the cost of his life.
First Expedition: The Gambia Budgett thought first of the Nile but a friend suggested the Gambia. He sailed on 19 October 1898, arriving on 3 November. His stay lasted eight months. He kept a diary and recorded many observations. While searching for the breeding place of Polypterus he observed and collected other fish. He found Polypterus containing ova but not developing ova. He tried artificial fertilisation and he tried holding fish in cages to breed but these methods failed. He was constantly battling against the heat and against illness. Towards the end of July he was confined to bed and on 28 July he started his return journey. Although he had failed in his main goal he had gained experience; he had established the breeding period of Polypterus and he had collected information about the fauna of the Gambia. Three papers were published.
Nathan Harrington