Merrill, Maine Manila - Arnold Arboretum

1 E. D. Merrill, From Maine to ManilaIda HayTwenty-two years of adventure in Southeast Asia preceded E. D. Merrill scareer as director of several important botanical institutions, among them theArnold Arboretum . His knowledge of the flora of Asia and the South Pacificwas encyclopedic, and it was said he could name more species at sight thanany other American twenty-six-year-old Elmer Drew Merrillleft New York harbor for Manila on February 22,1902, he had no idea that he would remain inthe Philippines for the next twenty-two years,laying the foundation for a botanical inventoryof the archipelago.

2 After accepting a job offer asbotanist with the Insular Bureau of Agriculture,he had had less than forty-eight hours to arrangehis affairs, pack, and get to the boat. This rough-and-ready approach, spawned of a rigorouschildhood in rural Maine , was to characterizeMerrill s remarkable life: this would not be thelast time he made a major career change at thedrop of a 1935 to 1946, Merrill was director ofthe Arnold Arboretum and Administrator ofHarvard University s Botanical Collections,which included the Botanic Garden, the GrayHerbarium, the Bussey Institution, the Botani-cal Museum, the Harvard Forest, the AtkinsInstitution, and the Farlow Reference Libraryand Herbarium.

3 When he arrived at Harvard, hehad already had sixteen years experience man-aging organizations with diverse functions, inaddition to an extraordinary record of scholar-ship and publication in taxonomic was born in 1876 in East Auburn, Maine , a village of farmers and shoe factoryworkers, one of twins. He described his progeni-tors as simple, hardworking folk who, neverthe-less, possessed the "pioneer spirit." Hismaternal grandfather was a forty-niner whojourneyed to California by way of Panama,returning to his wife and children in Mainewithout having found any gold.

4 Merrill s fatherhad run away to sea at age fourteen and workedas a common sailor until he married; he contin-ued to sign on for extended fishing trips to theGrand Banks during E. D. s youth. It was thework and the pleasures of rural life that shapedMerrill s character, as he recalled years later:Swimming, boating, fishmg, hunting , trampmgin the woods-many things were more appealingto us than work, but when there was work to bedone it always came fmst. " Yet even at an early age he often found time tocollect natural history specimens and to their three older siblings, Elmer andhis twin, Dana, continued their educationbeyond the elementary grades, attending highschool in Auburn, three miles distant from theirhome.

5 In one of his more telling comments onhis background, Merrill wrote:Many times in winter we walked the entire dis-tance to the city m a howling blizzard only tofind "no sessions" because of the mclementweather. We came to have a rather scornful opin-ion of city people, not blaming the children, butrather the authorities. At times we made thetrip on This school experiencedoubtless had its effect in establishing onequality-that of persistence, a quality to which Ibelieve I owe most of the success as I attamedm after graduating, both young men entered theMaine State College at Orono, which becamethe University of Maine in 1898, the year they12 Mernll, nght, and E.

6 B. Copeland, left, with Joseph French and, standing, Henry Osgood, m the bachelor s messm Mamla, ca. 1905. From the time he arnved m the Phihppmes until he recemed an appomtment as AssociateProfessor of Botany m the University of the Phihppmes m 1912, mermll spent at least half his time workmg inthe field. E. B. Copeland, who ~omed the botanical staff of the Bureau of Science m 1903, was one of Memll straveling companions. In 1909, accompamed by a group of Amemcan schoolteachers, the two climbed to thesummit of Mount Pulog in northern Luzon, the third known ascent of the mountam by Westernersreceived their degrees.

7 Although they enrolledas engineering students, they both transferredto the general science course after a surfeit ofmath classes during their first year. During hisremaming undergraduate years, Elmer took asmany biology courses as he could and studiedthe classification of flowering plants on hisown since no formal training was offered. Likemost New England botanists of his day, hetramped and botanized on New Hampshire sMount Washington and likewise exploredMount Katahdin in northern Maine . He latergave his 2,000-specimen herbarium to theNew England Botanical Club.

8 He also traded acollection of his pressed plants dating from thisperiod to Nathaniel Lord Bmtton for a copy ofBritton and Brown s Illustrated Flora of theNorthern United States. Though neither ofthem could have foreseen it, Merrill would oneday succeed Britton as director of the New YorkBotamcal outbreak of the Spanish-American Wardetermined Dana Merrill s career choice. Heenlisted in the Maine Volunteer Infantry,received his diploma in absentia that spring,and soon headed out to fight in the remained in the Army after the war andadvanced through the ranks to brigadier generalin remained at Orono for a year aftergraduation.

9 While he worked as an assistant inthe Department of Natural Science, he tookadditional courses and continued to study sys-tematic botany on his own. (In 1904, the Uni-versity of Maine awarded him a master s degreefor this work.) In 1899 he went to work in Wash-13ington at the Department of Agriculture(USDA) as an assistant agrostologist (a special-ist in grasses, a family Merrill termed "particu-larly difficult"). He found the job rewardingand appreciated the opportunity to becomemore familiar with the literature of plant tax-onomy, but he was still undecided about acareer.

10 With time on his hands evenings, hecompleted a year and a half of medical the offer of employment in the Philippinesturned him permanently in the direction ofplant the many programs the govern-ment started in the Philippines after taking itover from the Spanish was an Insular Bureau ofAgriculture, opened in 1901, the year beforeMerrill was persuaded by his boss at the USDAto accept the post of botanist there. He hadexpected to see his brother Dana when hearrived in Manila after the two-month voyage,but m the first of many ironies that would punc-almost nonexistent in Manila ; any botanicalspecimens and literature that had beenassembled during the long years of Spanish rulehad either burned in the 1898 war or disap-peared during the disruptive period of Americantakeover.