DR. JOEL ASAPH ALLEN: AN APPRECIATION 



THE Journal congratulates itself on the privilege of publishing as 

 its frontispiece the portrait of Dr. Joel Asaph Allen, dean in senior- 

 ity and accomplishment of the American Museum's scientific staff. 

 While the past quarter of a century has swept by with its political problems 

 and its economic struggles, one man has sat at his desk in the American 

 Museum content to do the work that crowded before him. To-day this 

 man is one of the country's great men of science with but few who can equal 

 him in achievement. 



Dr. Allen came to the American Museum in 188.5 from the Museum of 

 Comparative Zoology at Cambridge where he had been assistant in orni- 

 thology and mammalogy and for many years a student under Agassiz, hav- 

 ing been fortunate enough to accompany Agassiz on the Thayer expedition 

 to Brazil and the Amazon. He is one of the men to whom has passed the 

 spirit of devotion for natural history that Agassiz felt and the inspiration 

 Agassiz gained in early comradeship with Carl Schimper and others and 

 later from Oken and Cuvier. 



Dr. Allen on leaving Cambridge was already a scientist of renown, 

 but it is at the x\merican Museum that he has done the bulk of his work 

 leading the institution to honor through the high character of his researches 

 and receiving in return unusual opportunity — in this case opportunity 

 that forced much of his investigation into the definite lines of the systematist. 

 Zoological classification however is a far different thing to-day from what 

 it was in the time of Linn?eus or even of the great naturalists of a century 

 ago, for the lines of descent and blood relationship can be drawn close in 

 accordance with very extensive knowledge in comparative anatomy, his- 

 tology and embryology, pahT?ontology and geographical distribution. But 

 the man who rises to first rank must have a master mind that can make a 

 wide sweep of this modern horizon as well as the keen eye of the master 

 observer and the discriminating judicial power by which to disentangle the 

 contradictions of a multitudinous bibliography. 



Dr. Allen has been one of the men to shape zoological classification and 

 keep it in line. He has described new families and genera and many hun- 

 dreds of new species and through a close study of geographical distribution 

 in relation to species formation, has also drawn the distinctions clearer 

 in many series of intergrading subspecies. His researches have been pub- 

 lished under some fifteen hundred titles, some of which like his American 

 Bisons, 1876, and Ilistori/ of North American Pinnipcdia, 1897, are in book 

 form and others in articles and monographs appearing in the Bulletins and 

 Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology and of the American 

 Museum of Natural History, and also scatteringly in the Proceedings of 

 the Biological Society of Washington, U. S. National Museum, Boston 

 Society of Natural History, Phila(l('li)hia .Academy of Sciences and IL S. 

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