Clinton Hart Merriam and his youngest sister, Florence, c. 1863. From the collection of Zenaida Merriam Talbot.
Gallery of Clinton Merriam
1872
United States
Clinton Hart Merriam in his teens. The early 1870s.
College/University
Career
Gallery of Clinton Merriam
1887
United States
Portrait photo of Clinton Hart Merriam.
Gallery of Clinton Merriam
1889
Flagstaff, Arizona, United States
Merriam’s surveying party camping in the aspens somewhere above Flagstaff in 1889. Clockwise from top left: Leonard Stejneger, Frank Hall Knowlton, Vernon Bailey, Merriam, and Elizabeth Merriam.
Gallery of Clinton Merriam
1891
Death Valley, California, United States
Clinton Hart Merriam during the Death Valley expedition of 1891.
Gallery of Clinton Merriam
1891
Death Valley, California, United States
Clinton Hart Merriam and Lewis Morris during the Death Valley expedition of 1891.
Gallery of Clinton Merriam
1901
United States
Clinton Hart Merriam, half-length portrait, facing left.
Gallery of Clinton Merriam
1914
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Photograph of former President Theodore Roosevelt in the car of Dr. Clinton Hart Merriam, biologist, and naturalist, at Union Station, Washington D.C. The former President was headed to the new National Museum (now the National Museum of Natural History) to view a new exhibit he helped sponsor.
Achievements
Membership
American Ornithologists' Union
An early conservationist, Merriam was the most active founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union.
Washington Academy of Sciences
Merriam was a founder of the Washington Academy of Sciences.
American Society of Mammalogists
Merriam was a founder of the American Society of Mammalogists.
National Geographic Society
Merriam was a founder of the National Geographic Society.
Linnaean Society of New York
Merriam was a founder and first president of the Linnaean Society of New York.
American Society of Naturalists
Merriam was the president of the American Society of Naturalists in 1924-1925.
Merriam’s surveying party camping in the aspens somewhere above Flagstaff in 1889. Clockwise from top left: Leonard Stejneger, Frank Hall Knowlton, Vernon Bailey, Merriam, and Elizabeth Merriam.
Photograph of former President Theodore Roosevelt in the car of Dr. Clinton Hart Merriam, biologist, and naturalist, at Union Station, Washington D.C. The former President was headed to the new National Museum (now the National Museum of Natural History) to view a new exhibit he helped sponsor.
Merriam was the president of the American Society of Naturalists in 1924-1925.
Connections
Sister: Florence Merriam Bailey
Father: Clinton Levi Merriam
mentor: Spencer Baird
Spencer Fullerton Baird (February 3, 1823 – August 19, 1887) was an American naturalist, ornithologist, ichthyologist, herpetologist, and museum curator.
Clinton Hart Merriam was an American zoologist, mammalogist, ornithologist, entomologist, ethnographer, and naturalist. He is remembered as a founder of the National Geographic Society. Merriam was noted for bringing major attention to the study of North American land vertebrates and to the biogeographical settings in which they lived.
Background
Clinton Hart Merriam was born on December 5, 1855, in New York City, and was the second son and second of four children of Clinton Levi Merriam and Caroline Hart. The classicist Augustus Chapman Merriam was his uncle. His father, a merchant, and stockbroker retired from business early and built a mansion at Locust Grove in Lewis County, New York, where his Connecticut forebears had settled in 1800; he later served two terms as a Republican in Congress. Merriam's mother was the daughter of a Collinsville, New York, judge. His younger sister Florence Augusta, who married one of Merriam's close associates, the biologist Vernon Bailey, became an ornithologist and writer.
Merriam’s parents both encouraged his interest in collecting birds. Boyhood life at Locust Grove, in the shadow of the Adirondacks, set the pattern of Merriam's career. At the age of twelve, he began collecting birds and insects and soon expanded his interests to include reptiles, mammals, plants, and marine invertebrates. Through Spencer F. Baird, to whom his father introduced him, the boy was appointed, when only sixteen, to collect bird skins and eggs on Hayden’s geological and geographical survey of the territories.
Education
Merriam received his early education from private tutors and later studied at the Pingry Military School in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Williston Seminary in Easthampton, Massachusetts. In 1874 he entered the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale. There he developed an interest in medicine, and in 1877 he enrolled in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. He graduated in 1879 with a Doctor of Medicine degree.
For six years after graduation Merriam practiced medicine in Locust Grove. During this time, Merriam invented scientific and surgical instruments as well as wrote a medical treatise, though the manuscript was unfortunately lost on the way to the printer. While practicing medicine, Merriam corresponded with his naturalist colleagues and continued to build his collection of animal specimens, with a growing interest in mammals.
Merriam's real career began in 1885 when, through the efforts of Baird and others, Congress voted to establish a section of "economic ornithology" under the Department of Agriculture's Division of Entomology, to carry on the survey of bird distribution in the United States begun by the American Ornithologists' Union. Merriam was put in charge of the section, which the next year was elevated to a separate division and in 1896 was given a name reflecting its broader purpose, the Division of Biological Survey. It became a bureau in 1905, and Merriam remained its head until 1910.
Under Merriam's direction, the Biological Survey actively promoted investigations of American plants and animals, organized and led biological expeditions, and built up permanent collections. In 1899, he organized and directed a summer collecting expedition to Alaska, sponsored by the railroad financier Edward H. Harriman, and later edited and oversaw the publication of the results, in twelve volumes (1901-1914). Merriam inaugurated wildlife conservation as a federal responsibility by helping to secure the Lacey Act of 1900, which prohibited interstate commerce in the illegally killed game and regulated the importation of foreign species.
Merriam was a meticulous writer who spent hours in correcting and polishing. His first major publication was A Review of the Birds of Connecticut (1877), which was followed by many papers on birds. After 1881, however, his interest shifted to mammals, and his publications included monographic studies of the pocket gophers, shrews, weasels, and bears. He himself wrote most of the first ten numbers of the North American Fauna, though he was not above affixing his name to the writings of subordinates. All told, Merriam described twenty-four genera and some 660 new taxa of mammals. His friends persuaded Mrs. E. H. Harriman to establish a trust fund, to be administered through the Smithsonian Institution, which would allow him complete freedom in his research, and in 1910 he resigned from the Survey and took quarters in the Smithsonian.
Instead of preparing a definitive work on North American mammals, however, as had been expected, Merriam turned to a recently acquired new interest, the ethnology of the Indian tribes of California and Nevada, on which he published some dozen articles and two volumes of Indian folktales. His one later works on mammals, Review of the Grizzly and Big Brown Bears of North America (1918), was badly flawed and much criticized. In 1939, two years after his wife's death, he retired from his Smithsonian post and went to live with a daughter in Berkeley, California.
Merriam was basically a collector of facts rather than a theorist, but he validated through his field data the hypothesis of A. Hyatt Verrill and Joel A. Allen that the distribution of plants and animals was determined primarily by temperature factors. Merriam's concept of life zones was widely accepted by the scientific world, though his use of a single parameter has since been abandoned in favor of a more dynamic, complex scheme. As the Biological Survey expanded, administrative and political pressures increased, and Merriam found his position less congenial.
Quotations:
"I was a reasonably good student in college. My chief interests were scientific. When I entered college, I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history, and my ambition was to be a scientific man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or Baird, or Coues type - a man like Hart Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or Hornaday, to-day."
Membership
An early conservationist, Merriam was the most active founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union and a founder of the Washington Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Mammalogists, and the National Geographic Society. He was a founder and first president of the Linnaean Society of New York, and the president of the American Society of Naturalists in 1924-1925.
American Ornithologists' Union
,
United States
Washington Academy of Sciences
,
United States
American Society of Mammalogists
,
United States
National Geographic Society
,
United States
Linnaean Society of New York
,
United States
American Society of Naturalists
,
United States
Personality
Of moderate stature and robust build, Merriam was a man of great energy and wide learning, yet without pretense. His personality evoked varying reactions. Some associates thought him dictatorial, ambitious, and perverse; others found him warm-hearted, sympathetic, and charming, though intolerant of incompetence. His enthusiasm won him many friends, notably Theodore Roosevelt.
Connections
On October 15, 1886, Merriam married Virginia Elizabeth Gosnell of Martinsburg. They had two daughters, Dorothy and Zenaida.