308 OUR FEDERAL LANDS 



a student in Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, had 

 become deeply interested in the breeding range of 

 birds as affected by temperature. 



Upon graduation as a physician, failing to find 

 funds to conduct a survey of wild life distribution in 

 New York State in furtherance of theories of fau- 

 nal areas suggested first by Humbolt and advanced 

 by A. E. Verrill, J. A. Allen, and others, he had set- 

 tled into successful medical practice, but in 1885 had 

 utilized a vacation to visit Germany in the interest in 

 Europe of the bird migration studies of the Ornitho- 

 logical Union. 



Meantime government naturalists had secured 

 from Congress an appropriation of five thousand 

 dollars for extension of the Union's work on bird 

 migration, and Dr. Merriam received in Germany a 

 cablegram asking his acceptance of a position as 

 ornithologist in the Department of Agriculture look- 

 ing to organization of a new Division to study the 

 economic relations of birds. 



Scenting an opportunity to resume investiga- 

 tions of f aunal zones, thereafter on a national scale, 

 he accepted, but on reaching Washington found that 

 his Section of Economic Ornithology had been cre- 

 ated as a part of the Division of Entomology and that 

 his research work on birds would be directed by an 

 entomologist. 



Chagrined, nevertheless he set to work on the 

 relations of birds to agriculture, producing reports 

 conspicuously useful to farmers, meantime collect- 



