Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Ingersoll, Ernest

INGERSOLL, Ernest, naturalist, b. in Monroe, Mich., 13 March, 1852. His grandfather was one of the earliest emigrants to the Western Reserve of Ohio. He spent his youth in ranging the fields and marshes in search of natural-history objects, pursued an irregular course in Oberlin college, chiefly devoting himself to science, and was made curator of the college museum. He afterward became a special student in the Harvard museum of comparative zoölogy, devoting himself to the study of birds. He spent the summer of 1873 with Louis Agassiz in his seaside school on Penikese, and after the death of Agassiz served as naturalist and collector with the Hayden survey in the west, and during 1874 contributed scientific articles and sketches of travel to the New York “Tribune.” He made a second trip to the west in 1877, corresponding with the “New York Herald.” He became a member of the U. S. fish commission, and a special agent of the tenth census in 1880, for the investigation of the American oyster industries, and in 1883 he was sent to California to prepare articles for “Harper's Magazine.” Mr. Ingersoll is now (1887) editor of the publications of the Canadian Pacific railway, residing in Montreal. He has made investigations in conchology and other branches of natural history, and is the author of “A Natural History of the Nests and Eggs of American Birds” (seven parts, Salem, 1879); “Birds' Nesting” (1881); a report on the “History and Present Condition of the Oyster Industries of the United States” (Washington, 1881); “Friends Worth Knowing: Glimpses of American Natural History” (New York, 1881); “Knocking 'Round the Rockies” (1882); “The Crest of the Continent” (1883); “Old Ocean” (Boston, 1883); “Country Cousins” (New York, 1884); “The Ice Queen” (1885); “To the Shenandoah and Beyond” (1885); “The Strange Ventures of a Stowaway” (Philadelphia, 1886); “Down East Latch-Strings” (Boston, 1887); several pamphlets; and a series of books on natural history for the young.