Work
Holland appears to have been a difficult man to work with. Given to tantrums, he was somewhat of a sycophant towards his betters (including Carnegie), and seemingly condescending when dealing with employees. However, in this he didn't really differ from his colleagues in Chicago or New York (such as H.F. Osborn). Despite maintaining a prime interest in lepidoptery, he did manage to train himself as a competent paleontologist when the directorship of the Carnegie Museum was thrust upon him.
As director of the Carnegie Museums, Holland achieved international renown for supervising the mounting of several casts of the sauropod dinosaur Diplodocus, a donation by Carnegie to natural history museums throughout Europe. His trip to Argentina in 1912 to install a replica of a Diplodocus, at the behest of Carnegie, is told by Holland in his 1913 travel book To the River Plate and Back. The Diplodocus campaign earned him his share of international recognition as well, in the form of a French legion d'honneur and a German knight's cross, among others.
Holland was America's great popularizer of butterflies and moths in the first half of the twentieth century. Holland's The Butterfly Book (1898) and The Moth Book (1903) are both still widely used. Holland donated his private collection exceeding 250,000 specimens to the Carnegie Museum . He supported active collectors worldwide, obtaining major collections from previously uncollected regions between 1890 and 1930 through the efforts of William Doherty, Herbert Huntingdon Smith, H.L. Weber, J. Steinbach, S.M. Klages and many others.
Read more about this topic: William Jacob Holland
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