Fluent in Scottish Gaelic, French and German, as a young boy he developed a keen and enduring interest in grasshoppers that proliferated in his father's fields; seven species of which formed the basis of his 1916 paper in which he described what is known as a Robertsonian translocation (ROB).
[2][3][4][12] Graduating Abilene High School he attended the University of Kansas (A.B., 1906; A.M., 1907), one of Clarence Erwin McClung's eager students of cytology.
Held in great esteem by the students he inspired with measured and painstaking research practices, he was deceased before the preparation of their manuscript, while Professor in the Anatomy Department of the Medical School of the University of Iowa.
[3] [1] The final years of his life in Iowa were devoted to teaching, graduate students and further cytogenetics research dealing with the chromosomal relations in pigmy locusts and some larger grasshoppers.
"[3][13] Dr. Robertson is buried alongside his parents at the Keystone Cemetery in Dickinson County, Kansas; his scientific legacy born of childhood curiosity on its plains.