October 28, 1921] 



SCIENCE 



399 



of the North American Eodentia, the latter 

 in cooperation with Dr. Elliot Coues. At 

 this time his interest was dra^vn to marine 

 mammals and after he published a " History 

 of North American Pinnipeds " he took up 

 the Cetaceans, but illness checked the work 

 before it was finished and the results never 

 were printed. A short trip to Colorado was 

 taken, upon the advice of a physician, in the 

 attempt to throw off this illness, but a nerv- 

 ous breakdown resulted and it was months 

 before active work could be resumed. 



In 1885, the financial resources of the Mu- 

 seum of Comparative Zoology were so re- 

 stricted as to cut down opportunities for the 

 staff, and Dr. Allen accepted a curatorship 

 in the American Museum of Natural History 

 in New York City. He took over his duties 

 on May 1, 1885, and served thirty-six years in 

 that capacity, as curator of the department 

 of ornithology and mammalogy. Later this 

 department was divided into the department 

 of mammalogy and the department of orni- 

 thology, Dr. Allen retaining the curatorship 

 of the former department. In 1921, he was 

 made honorary curator in order to give him 

 entire freedom for research work. 



At the time he took over the department, 

 the collections were very small with no re- 

 search facilities, and no study collection to 

 serve as the basis for original work. During 

 his tenure, the department entered upon a 

 period of growth and expansion of marvelous 

 proportions. At first he was alone, without 

 any assistants, but in 1888, he was given his 

 first assistant, Mr. Frank M. Chapman, and 

 later others joined the department until at 

 the time of his death, the scientific staff of the 

 two departments which were formerly his de- 

 partment, numbered ten, besides non-staff 

 assistants and field collectors. Collections 

 were brought in, first from the United States, 

 Mexico and British Columbia; and then the 

 scope of activities was enlarged to take in 

 South America, Africa and tlie Orient. In 

 1921, his department had parties in the field 

 and plans for work in Asia, Africa, Australia, 

 Nortli America, South America and the West 

 Indies. 



Coincident with the vast accumulation of 

 research collections, which grew from practi- 

 cally nil, in 1885 when the new curator took 

 charge, to a total of about 50,000 specimens 

 of mammals in 1921, there has been a cor- 

 responding increase in the number of mam- 

 mal groups placed upon exhibition in his de- 

 partment. There has been a transition from 

 the hall filled with a heterogeneous assem- 

 blage of mounted individuals to halls given 

 over to carefully planned habitat groups 

 which tell a story. Publications from the 

 department of mammals may be said to be- 

 gin with Dr. Allen's curatorship and the 

 total number of scientific papers written by 

 him in this capacity is a surprisingly large 

 number. 



While Dr. Allen devoted his later years 

 almost exclusively to research in mammalogy, 

 the sum total of his endeavors discloses work 

 in many other branches of natural science. 

 The bibliography, published in the volume 

 also containing the autobiogi-aphy^, contains 

 the following large numbers of titles: papers 

 on mammals, 271; on birds, 966; on reptiles, 

 5; on zoogeography, 9; on evolution, 22; on 

 nomenclature, 35; on biography, 134; miscel- 

 laneous, 20 ; a grand total of 1,433 titles pub- 

 lished up to 1916. Since 1916 many other 

 papers have appeared and a great deal of 

 manuscript has been prepared which has not 

 been published. When it is considered that 

 each one of these publications is a well 

 thought out piece of work, in most cases 

 necessitating days spent in the study of 

 material, and that many of them are pajjers 

 of length, such as his monographs on the 

 bison, the seals or the musk ox, which con- 

 tain several hundred pages of text, then one 

 is forced to marvel at the amount of mental 

 labor involved and the tireless energy that 

 drove the man. 



His youthful yearnings for editorial work 

 were realized to the full. Beginning with 

 the year 1874, when he edited a volume of the 

 Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural 



1 ' ' Autobiographical Notes and a Bibliography 

 of the Scientific Publications of Joel Asaph Allen. ' ' 

 American Museum of Natural History in 1916. 



