Clinton Hart Merriam
| Clinton Hart Merriam | |
|---|---|
Picture of Clinton Hart Merriam, by Frances Benjamin Johnston
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| Born | December 5, 1855 New York City |
| Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Berkeley, California |
| Nationality | USA |
| Fields | Zoology Ornithology Ethnography |
| Institutions | United States Department of Agriculture National Geographic Society |
| Known for | Life zone concept |
| Author abbrev. (botany) | Merriam |
Clinton Hart Merriam (December 5, 1855 – March 19, 1942) was an American zoologist, ornithologist, entomologist, ethnographer, and naturalist.
Contents
Life and career
Known as "Hart" to his friends, Merriam was born in New York City in 1855. His father, Clinton Levi Merriam, was a U.S. congressman.
Merriam studied biology and anatomy at Yale University and obtained an M.D. from the School of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1879. He taught for a while at Harvard University.
Merriam died in Berkeley, California in 1942.
His sister Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey was a pioneering ornithologist who introduced popular field guides for bird identification. She married Vernon Bailey a field naturalist and long-time collecting partner of C. Hart Merriam's. His grandson Lee Merriam Talbot (born 1930) was a geographer and ecologist who was among the IUCN team which rediscovered the Persian fallow deer in 1957, and secretary general of the IUCN from 1980 to 1983.
Zoology
In 1886, he became the first chief of the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy of the United States Department of Agriculture, predecessor to the National Wildlife Research Center and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1883, he was a founding member of the American Ornithologists' Union.[1] He was one of the original founders of the National Geographic Society in 1888. He developed the concept of "life zones" to classify biomes found in North America along an altitudinal sequence corresponding to the zonal latitudinal sequence from Equator to Pole. In mammalogy, he is known as an excessive splitter, proposing, for example, tens of different species of North American brown bears in several genera.
In 1899, he helped railroad magnate E. H. Harriman to organize an exploratory voyage along the Alaska coastline.
Some species of animals that bear his name are Merriam's wild turkey (Meliagris gallopavo meriami), the now extinct Merriam's elk (Cervus elaphus merriami), Merriam's pocket mouse (Perognathus merriami) and Merriam's chipmunk (Tamias merriami). Much of his detail-oriented taxonomy continues to be influential within mammalogical and ornithological circles.[citation needed]
American Mammalogy
Merriam was commonly known as the Father of Mammalogy, a branch of Zoology referring to the study of mammals – a class of vertebrates with characteristics such as homeothermic metabolism, fur, four-chambered hearts, and complex nervous systems. He began his career in Natural Science, at the age of 16, with an 1872 Harden Survey. At 18, he published a report of his biological studies on mammals and birds. Following his induction into natural sciences, Merriam studied at Yale and received his M.D from Columbia in 1879.
After college, while he began with a brief career in medicine, in 1883 he revived his early fascination with the study of mammal species, and became one of the founding members of the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1883 where he continued his studies on different species of mammals. The first term he coined was "Atophyrax bendirii" in 1884. Following his growing notoriety in the natural science sphere, he became close friends with former president Theodore Roosevelt, and, at the age of 30, was asked to take charge of the newly established section of ornithology in the Entomological Division of the United States Department of Agriculture in 1885. This later on became known as the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1905. Heading the Bureau for 25 years, he became known as a national figure and improved the scientific understanding of the birds and mammals of the United States.[3]
As the head of the Bureau, Merriam inaugurated the North American Fauna series where he described 71 new species and several new genera of mammals. After revising brown and grizzly bears of North America, he named an additional 84 species. Later on, in 1898, Merriam was able to visit Colorado Plateau in 1889. He published the results of a biological survey of the San Francisco Mountain region and desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona in 1890, where he developed the idea of "Life Zones." Merriam’s explanation of “Life Zones,” seven categories based on temperature and humidity, was nevertheless an important idea that he developed after an expedition into the Painted Desert. In 1899, he helped organized the Harriman Alaska Expedition, with Edward Harriman, where they explored coast of Alaska for two months, from Seattle to Siberia and back again. After that was named the President of American Ornithologists' Union in 1902.
However, around 1910 he began to focus more so on ethnology of California Indians.[4]
Native Americans
Later in life, funded by the Harriman family, Merriam's focus shifted to studying and assisting the Native American tribes in the western United States. His contributions on the myths of central California and on ethnogeography were particularly noteworthy.
See also
References
- Bean, Lowell John. 1993. "Introduction". In The Dawn of the World: Myths and Tales of the Miwok Indians of California, by C. Hart Merriam, pp. 1–12. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
- Kroeber, A. L. 1955. "C. Hart Merriam as Anthropologist". In Studies of California Indians, by C. Hart Merriam, pp. vii–xiv. University of California Press, Berkeley.
- Sterling, Keir B. 1974. The Last of the Naturalists: The Career of C. Hart Merriam. Arno Press, New York.
- Anon. 1942 [Merriam, C. H.] Ent. News 53:150
- Anon. 1942 [Merriam, C. H.] Science 95: 318
- Daubunnire, R. F. 1938: [Merriam, C. H.]. Quart. Rev. Biol. 13:327–332
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to [[commons:Lua error in Module:WikidataIB at line 506: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).|Lua error in Module:WikidataIB at line 506: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).]]. |
- C. Hart Merriam, Dawn of the World: Myths and Weird Tales Told by the Mewan Indians of California (1910)
- C. Hart Merriam, Indian Village and Camp Sites in Yosemite Valley, Sierra Club Bulletin (1917)
- USDA Merriam National Wildlife Research Center
- BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF CLINTON HART MERRIAM
- C. Hart Merriam Collection of Native American Photographs, ca. 1890–1938 at The Bancroft Library
- Guide to the C. Hart Merriam Papers, Volume 1 and Volume 2 at The Bancroft Library
- C. Hart Merriam Collection at Princeton University
- USGS North American Bird Phenology Program: Clinton Hart Merriam
- Lua error in Module:Internet_Archive at line 573: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
- Articles with unsourced statements from June 2008
- Botanists with author abbreviations
- Commons category link from Wikidata
- Articles with Internet Archive links
- 1855 births
- 1942 deaths
- Yale University alumni
- Columbia University alumni
- Harvard University faculty
- Historians of Native Americans
- American zoologists
- American anthropologists
- American ethnologists
- American entomologists
- National Geographic Society founders
- American mammalogists
