Background

Merritt Lyndon Fernald was born on October 5, 1873, in Orono, Maine, United States. His parents were Mary Lovejoy Heywood and Merritt Caldwell Fernald. His father taught and served two terms as president of the Maine State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, which later became the University of Maine.

Education

Fernald attended Orono High School; there he decided that he wanted to become a botanist. He collected plants around Orono and had two botanical papers published while still at high school. He then attended Maine State College (now the University of Maine) for a year, but began working as an assistant at the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University when he was 17. He began studying at Harvard in 1891, graduated magna cum laude in 1897.

Career

Fernald worked for the Gray Herbarium in one capacity or another for the rest of his life. He worked as an assistant in the herbarium from 1891 to 1902; as an instructor of botany from 1902 to 1905; as an assistant professor from 1905 to 1915; and as Fisher Professor of Natural History from 1915 to 1947. He was also curator of the Gray Herbarium, 1935-1937, and director, 1937-1947.

Fernald is known for his work on phytogeography. He combined extensive field work with his herbarium work, concentrating on the flora of eastern North America. He did much exploring in Quebec in his younger years; when older, he worked in Virginia. During his lifetime he produced over 750 papers and memoirs. Within a year of beginning his work at Harvard, he completed the second edition of the Portland Catalogue of Maine Plants, publishing supplements in 1895 and 1897. With Benjamin Lincoln Robinson he produced the 7th revision of Gray's Manual, which appeared in 1907. He wrote Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America with Alfred C. Kinsey, published in 1943. His major work was the 8th revision of Gray's Manual, published in 1950. Before his death, he was planning "a large work on plant distribution."

Achievements

• Merritt Lyndon Fernald went down in history as a respected scholar of the taxonomy and phytogeography of the vascular plant flora of temperate eastern North America. During his career, he published more than 850 scientific papers and wrote and edited the seventh and eighth editions of Gray's Manual of Botany.
  
  Fernald received honorary degrees from Acadia University in 1933 and the University of Montreal in 1938. He was also awarded the 1940 Leidy Award from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

Works

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• book

  • Gray's Manual of Botany: Eighth (Centennial) Edition

    (A handbook of the flowering plants and ferns of the centr...)

    1950
  • Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America 1943
  • New manual of botany 1908
  • An Acadian plant sanctuary 1917
  • Plant Lists 1905
  • Notes on the Flora of Western Nova Scotia 1921
  • The Relationships Of Some American And Old World Birches 1902
  • The Northeastern Carices Of The Section Hyparrhenae 1902
  • The Northeastern Carices Of The Subsection Vesicariae 1901
  • The Genus Antennaria In New England 1898
  • Rhodora, Volume 11 1909
  • Rhodora, Volumes 24-25 1922
  • Rhodora, Volume 9 1907
  • Rhodora, Volume 16 1914
  • Rhodora, Volume 2 1900
  • Rhodora, Volume 23 1921
  • Rhodora, Volume 17 1915
  • Rhodora, Volume 14 1912
  • Rhodora, Volume 12 1910
  • Rhodora, Volume 1 1899
  • Rhodora, Volume 4 1902
  • Rhodora, Volume 19 1917

Membership

Fernald was active in the New England Botanical Club, serving as president from 1911-1914. He was a member and served as president of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, and was an active memeber in a number of other scientific associations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Linnaean Society of London, and the Torrey Botanical Club.

Personality

Fernald was tireless in the field, boyishly joyous, given to punning, and optimistic throughout his life. His tremendous industry and total absorption with systematic botany were the mainsprings of his success. A “mere grind” was his own appraisal, but his friend Ludlow Griscom called him a “one-pointed, one-sided botanical machine.”

Physical Characteristics: Fernald was a short, stout man.

Connections

On April 15, 1907, Fernald married Margaret Howard Grant, the daughter of Henry Tyler Grant Jr. and Annie M. Manton. The couple had three children; one of them died young.

Father:

Merritt Caldwell Fernald

Mother:

Mary Lovejoy Heywood

Spouse:

Margaret Howard Grant

Son:

Henry Grant Fernald

Daughter:

Katharine Fernald

Daughter:

Mary Fernald

colleague:

Benjamin Lincoln Robinson

colleague:

Alfred Kinsey

References

• Merritt Lyndon Fernald: Obituary
  1950