2 JOEL ASAPH ALLEN— CHAPMAN [MEMOmS [voL.Txt 



him young Allen borrowed, and afterward bought, a copy of the' Brewer edition of Wilson's 

 American Ornithology. Subsequently Nuttall's and Audubon's works on North American 

 birds were discovered in the Springfield Public Library, and the boy naturalist was launched 

 upon the career which, with never-ceasing pleasure to himself and increasing profit to science, 

 he followed for the succeeding 70 years. 



EDUCATION 



When one considers his comparative isolation and the general lack of interest in natural 

 phenomena of the period, Doctor Allen was singularly fortunate in finding men who could 

 give him the assistance he so eagerly sought. 



Shortly after meeting Horsford, a teacher took charge of the district school who possessed 

 a broader education than anyone with whom young Allen had come in contact. A nature 

 lover himself, he could appreciate his pupil's aspirations, and he not only assisted him in his 

 studies, but gave him a copy of Blythe's Cuvier's Animal Kingdom. This work greatly 

 enlarged the boy's horizon and showed his potential broadness as a naturalist. His interest in 

 nature did not, as often happens, begin and end with birds, but plants, mammals, reptiles, 

 fishes, insects — in short, the living world — equally appealed to him, and for years he kept a 

 detailed record of meteorological phenomena. His first publication, indeed, was a summary 

 from his journal of weather conditions, which appeared in the New England Farmer for 1858. 



Prof. Oliver Marcy followed the donor of " Cuvier" as the boy naturalist's friend and teacher. 

 Later he became dean of the faculty of Northwestern University, but at that time he was the 

 teacher of natural sciences at Wilbraham Academy, which Allen attended during the winter from 

 1858 to 1862. This was a productive period in his development. Under the sympathetic 

 guidance of Professor Marcy he selected his own studies, including physiology, astronomy, 

 chemistry, Latin, French, and German. His summers were still spent on the farm, but with 

 Humboldt's Cosmos, Lyell's Principles of Geology, and Dana's Mineralogy for companions, 

 it is clear that his horizon was not restricted to the hayfields. To demonstrate, however, his 

 value as a farm hand, the far from strong boy unduly exerted himself and this, with demands 

 made by a desire to gratify his passion for collection and study, told heavily on his health. 

 To these long periods of overwork, Doctor Allen attributed much of the semi-invalidism from 

 which he suffered in after years. 



Much of his spare time was now devoted to the study of botany, with the aid of Gray's 

 Manual, and to the making of a collection of plants. These, however, formed only a part of the 

 future curator's "museum." During the years 1859-1861 he collected and mounted some 300 

 birds, representing nearly 100 species, numerous mammals, reptiles, fishes, amphibians, some mol- 

 lusks, and several hundred insects. Local minerals and rocks also found a place on the shelves 

 of the room which did duty for a museum. These specimens indicated not a boyish desire to 

 acquire; they were named and catalogued as part of a naturalist's equipment. 



"The whole," Doctor Allen writes, "was amateurish in the extreme, and represented merely 

 a superficial acquaintance with a wide range of subjects, but enough to add immensely to the 

 pleasure of living, giving, as it did, the sense of being in touch with the plant and animal life 

 and the geological features of my immediate environment. " 



Few local collections have done better service than the one which inaugurated Doctor 

 Allen's career in museum work. It not only directly increased its owner's knowledge, but by 

 its sale to Wilbraham Academy he was enabled to pay his tuition in that institution, where 

 future students could profit by his industry. 



The balance of the fund received for his beloved specimens enabled Doctor Allen to take 

 the most important step in his fife as a naturalist. While at Wilbraham Academy he found a 

 congenial spirit in a fellow pupil, William Harmon Niles, a nephew of Professor Marcy, and 

 who subsequently became professor of geology and physical geography in the Massachusetts 

 Institute of Technology. 



Niles planned to enter the Lawrence Scientific School as a pupil of Agassiz, and Allen 

 decided to join him. The necessary preliminaries having been arranged, they arrived in Cam- 



