John Campbell Merriam
John C. Merriam | |
---|---|
Doctoral students | William J. Sinclair |
John Campbell Merriam (October 20, 1869 – October 30, 1945) was an American
Biography
He was born in Hopkinton, Iowa, the eldest child of postmaster, store proprietor, and American Civil War veteran Charles E. Merriam. His middle name Campbell was his mother's middle name, and the maiden name of his maternal grandmother.
Both his father Charles E. Merriam and his paternal uncle Henry C. Merriam had served as officers in the 12th Iowa Infantry, Company K; after capture at the Battle of Shiloh, they were sent to Libby Prison for some time before being returned to the battlefields. Eventually, when the two brothers were mustered out, they returned to Iowa, married, and raised families. As a young man, he began collecting
In 1901 one of his lectures on paleontology inspired the young
In 1903 he was recognized as an Associate Member of the Boone and Crockett Club, a wildlife conservation organization founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell.[1]
In 1912 he was appointed chairman of the Department of Paleontology at the University of California. That same year he began his famous studies of vertebrates at the La Brea Tar Pits. He and his students categorized many of the vertebrate fossils found at the site, and many more were placed in storage.
In 1914, Merriam was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[3]
In 1918, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.[4] That same year, he co-founded the Save the Redwoods League, which began significant preservation efforts after Merriam traveled the Redwood areas of Humboldt County, California in 1922 seeking to spare its old-growth the effects of logging he witnessed in Redwood forests closer to San Francisco. A biography, which details his efforts to preserve wild lands in California and throughout the United States, was published in 2005.[5]
In 1919, Merriam served as president of the Geological Society of America.[6][7]
In 1920 he was appointed Dean of Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, but he left that same year to become president of the
Merriam was a founding member of the
Notably, his paternal first cousin Frank Merriam, the eldest child of Civil War veteran Henry C. Merriam, served as the 28th Governor of California between 1934 and 1939.
Education and University Degrees
Bachelor of Science, Lenox College, 1887. PhD,
ScD, Columbia University, 1921. ScD, Princeton University, 1922. ScD, Yale University, 1922. LLD, Wesleyan University, 1922. PHD, University of California, 1924. LLD, New York University, 1926. LLD, University of Michigan, 1933. LLD, Harvard University in 1935. ScD, University of Pennsylvania, 1936. ScD, State University of New York, 1937. LLD, George Washington University, 1937. ScD,
See also
References
- ^ "Boone and Crockett Club Archives".
- ^ Khan, Amina (September 9, 2015). "Within UC Berkeley's famous tower, a scarcely known trove of fossils". Los Angeles Times.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2023-11-06.
- ^ "John C. Merriam". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2023-11-06.
- ISBN 9780520241671.
- ^ Fairchild, Herman LeRoy, 1932, The Geological Society of America 1888–1930, a Chapter in Earth Science History: New York, The Geological Society of America, 232 p.
- ISBN 0-8137-1155-X.
- ^ "John Campbell Merriam". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 2023-02-09. Retrieved 2023-11-06.
- ^ Published Papers and Addresses of John Campbell Merriam. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington. 1938.
- ^ "USGS, A concise biography of John Campbell Merriam".