1897.] NATURAL SCIENCES OF PHILADELPHIA. 519 



nature of brief contributions to four of the more important Ameri- 

 can scientific journals and cover from one to four pages each. In 

 many cases they were simply elaborations of verbal announcements 

 first made at the meetings of this Academy. His monographic 

 work comes under four titles, and it is worthy of special note that 

 of the seventy titles appearing under his name, thirty-five relate 

 almost exclusively to the Chiroptera or bats. 



Dr. Allen's systematic work was confined wholly to the bats, a 

 fact the more remarkable in view of his wide knowledge of and 

 interest in many other families of the Mammalia. It is significant 

 of his very early interest in this difficult and neglected group of 

 animals, that his first published paper was printed in the Proceed- 

 ings of the Academy in 1861 under the title, Descriptions of New 

 Pteropine Bats from Africa. He here describes a new genus and 

 three new species of African bats in the collections made by Du 

 Chaillu and presented by subscription to the Academy. As a 

 fir.<t effort this paper is surprisingly well prepared, both from the 

 systematic and the anatomical points of view. Even granting 

 his anatomical knowledge as a graduate of medicine, it is difficult 

 to believe that the author had not made &, close study of the bats 

 previous to inspecting the Du Chaillu novelties. The theory 

 that his interest in the Du Chaillu collections, coupled with the 

 opportunity of entering upon a comparatively unworked field of 

 original research, was the incentive of his life-long devotion to study 

 of the Chiroptera, is probably correct. 



Only three short papers by him, all on the Chiroptera, appeared 

 between 1861 and 1864, during his service in the United States 

 Army. It was in Washington while thus engaged that he came 

 under the inspiring influence of Prof. S. F. Baird, to which was 

 probably due the issue, in 1864, of his first Mo7iograph of the Bats 

 of North America. 



Professor Baird having wholly omitted the Chiroptera from his 

 great work on North American mammals, published by the Govern- 

 ment in 1857, Dr. Allen was now able to supply a long felt need in the 

 zoological literature of America. Confined as it was to a technical 

 treatment of the species found north of Mexico, the monograph was 

 limited to eighty-five pages of a volume of the Smithsonian Miscel- 

 laneous Collections. Of the twenty species and eight genera recog- 

 nized, one genus and six species were first described by the author. 



