406 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 2 8 



endowed with energy and foresight. And in his undertaking as in 

 many others, success was furthered by the coincidence of two unre- 

 lated events — the awakening of this interest andi the decision of a 

 manufacturing company, which had hitherto been making clothes 

 wringers, to put on the market a cheap and convenient mouse trap. 

 The " Cyclone " trap, the first of the now familiar small traps of 

 the deadfall type, made its appearance during the later eighties of 

 the last century, at exactly the time when Merriam was beginning to 

 realize that his predecessors from Audubon and Bachman through 

 Baird to Coues and Allen had not completed the study of mammals 

 in North America. Armed with an effective trap he was able to 

 apply to the investigation of mammals the principles which he, had 

 learned from the study of birds, the salient features of which are 

 the bringing together and minute comparative study of large series 

 of specimens — all uniformly prepared — from every possible locality. 

 Had this not happened at this particular time, tlie recent history of 

 mammalogy would have been different throughout the world. 



Before the time when the " Cyclone " trap and its successors were 

 available, the kind of field work which I have briefly described was 

 unknown and the systematic collecting of the abundant smaller and 

 more interesting mammals was an impossibility. I remember my 

 own first attempts at field work, when the only traps to be had were 

 clumsy wooden objects stained bright red and shaped like a round 

 flat cheese with the side bored full of holes through which the victims 

 were expected to thrust their heads in order to be choked. Not in- 

 effective for house mice, these traps became exasperating failures when 

 carried out to the fields and woods. A summer's industrious work 

 with them failed to procure me a single individual of the short-tailed 

 shrew or the red-backed mouse, two of the common mammals in the 

 woods near my home. Then came word of the new technique and 

 with it six dozen " Cyclone " traps. Immediately I was able to get 

 all the specimens that I could prepare. 



In 1894 these methods were demonstrated at the British Museum, 

 where they were adopted by Oldfield Thomas, the man who has add- 

 ed more to the systematic knowledge of the mammals of the entire 

 world than any other one investigator. They rapidly spread to Ger- 

 many, France, Russia, and Japan, and they are now universally em- 

 ployed wherever mammals are studied. 



The development of mammalogy in North America, like that of 

 so many other branches of natural science, is heavily indebted to the 

 explorations begun in the fifties of the last century, which preceded 

 the laying of the first transcontinental railroads. The surveying 

 parties sent out by the Federal Government were accompanied by 

 field naturalists who made collections of surprising extent and value. 

 The mammal specimens all came to the Smithsonian Institution, 



