ALLEN, JOEL ASAPH

(b. Springfield, Massachusetts, 19 July 1838; d.CornwalLon-Hudson, New York, 29 August 1921)

zoohay.

Allen’s ancestors, who were of English descent, settled in New England in the 1630’s and 1640’s, and became farmers. His father, Joel Allen, had learned the carpenter’s trade but later turned to farming. His mother, Harriet Trumbull Allen, taught school before their marriage. Joel, the first of the couple’s four sons (one of whom died in infancy) and one daughter, grew up on the family farm in Springfield, His early training was verv puritanical; and his parents, who were Congregationalists, were rigid in their religious practices.

Allen showed an early interest in the wildlife around the family farm. At the age of thirteen he began collecting birds, which fie measured, weighed, described, and sketched. A new world was opened up to him when he discovered that people actually wrote books on birds and that names for them existed in English and Latin. He avidly read ornithological works by John James Audubon, Alexander Wilson, Thomas Nuttall, and others, and aspired to write a book on the birds of New England. During winters he attended a district school, where he was far ahead of the other pupils and was largely self-taught. Summers were spent on the farm helping his father, who did not share his son’s interest in natural history. When not doing his chores, Allen spent everv spare moment preparing specimens and making notes on his natural history observations. His constant dis-appearances naturally annoyed his father, who could not appreciate his absorption in such unpractical affairs. Allen’s mother was more supportive and often intervened in his favor. As a result he was eventually allowed one day a week lo pursue his zoological collecting and researches.

At the age of twenty Allen enrolled at the Wilbraham Academy in Springfield. which he attended for three winter terms. In 1861 he reluctantly sold his extensive zoological collection, which included hundreds of mounted specimens, to the academy. The sale gave him enough money lo enroll in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, where he studied under Louis Agassiz, the “revered teacher” to whom Allen later dedicated his autobiography. Agassiz’s first goal as a teacher was to train his pupils to observe. Allen was provided with hand lenses and several genera of corals and told to find out their methods of growth and development. “After a few hours of application we were asked” Well, what have you seen?’ and the same query was daily repeated. We reported what we thought we had discovered and if we had seen aright we were encouraged with a few words of approval; if we were mistaken the reply was’ You are wrong; you must look again; you must learn to see’’ (Autobiographical Notes, 8–9). Agassiz’s lectures, which were well attended by notable Bostonians, supplemented these observational exercises. Allen also took courses from Jeffries Wyman and Asa Gray; his fellow students included Alpheus Hyatt, William James. Edward Sylvester Morse, Alpheus Spring Packard. Jr., Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, and Addison Emery Verrill.

In 1865 Allen was invited to accompany Agassiz as one of fifteen assistants during his expedition to Brazil. Allen was detailed to a smaller party that was to make collections in the provinces north of Rio de Janeiro. He remained in Brazil for eight months, doing extensive inland collecting as far north as Bahia. When he returned to Boston, a chronic intestinal ailment acquired in Brazil forced his retirement to the family farm, where he remained for a year. He recovered and was able to spend several months collecting in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa before returning to Harvard as curator of mammals and birds at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in October 1867.

Allen spent the next eighteen years at the museum. During this period he made collecting expeditions to eastern Florida (1868–1869), the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (1871–1872) Yellowstone, Montana (1873), and Colorado (1882). Some measure of his collecting zeal may be gained from the record of specimens taken over a nine-month period in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains: 200 animal skins, 60 skeletons. 240 skulls, 1, 500 bird skins, 100 birds in alcoho1 many nests and eggs, and numerous fish, mollusks, insects, and crustaceans. While in the Yellowstone area in 1873 he was frequently in danger from hostile Sioux Indians. His military escort was Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, which was to perish three years later at the Little Big Horn, sixty miles south of where Allen had been collecting.

From 1874 to 1882 Allen concentrated largely on research and publication, His monograph The American Bisons (1876) was followed by one on North American pinnipeds—walruses, sea lions, and seals (1880). By 1882 Allen had so overworked himself that he was incapacitated by a nervous breakdown; in later years his health remained delicate.

In 1885 Allen entered the second phase of his career. Financial restrictions at the Museum of Comparative Zoology compelled him to accept the post of curator of birds and mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he remained until his death. There he presided over a twentyfold increase in the museums’s specimens of birds and mammals, which required his constant efforts in cataloging, labeling, and tending the collections. Only in 1888 was he assisted by Frank M. Chapman, who was to become a distinguished ornithologist in his own right.¹ The following year Allen became editor in chief of all the museum’s zoological publications, of which nearly sixty volumes appeared under fits supervision.

Allen was a cofounder (with Elliott Cones and William Brewster) of the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1883, and he was elected its first president (1883–1890), He played an active role in drafting this organization’s Code of Nomenclature (1886), which later became the basis for the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature and has had a major influence in standardizing nomenclaltural rules throughout the world. In 1910 Allen was elected a member of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. For twenty-eight years he edited the A.O.U.’s journal, The Auk (1884–1912), as he had the eight volumes of its predecessor, Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club (1876–1883), His publications include 1, 470 titles, mainly dealing with birds and mammals but also treating nomenclature, biogeography, and evolution, Among his honors were an honorary Ph.D. from Indiana University (1886). the Walker Grand Prize from the Boston Society of Natural History (1903), and the Linnaean Society (London) medal (1916). He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1876) and president of the Linnacan Society of New York (1890–1897).

Allen’s personality was marked by a tireless zeal for work, a scrupulous and sometimes pedantic attention to detail, and a sincere consideration for others. He was critical, however, of careless work or of conclusions based on insufficient evidence. His delicate health was probably linked to his extreme shyness, which prevented him from lecturing publicly and made even the delivery of scientific papers distasteful.

Allen’s first wife, Mary Manning Cleveland, whom he had married on 6 October 1874, died in April 1879; they had a son, Cleveland Allen. On 27 April 1886 Allen married Susan Augusta Taft, who survived him. They had no children.

Besides his prodigious labors in descriptive natural history and taxonomy, Allen’s most notable scientific contributions were in the domains of biogeography and nomenclature. His first major publication, which appeared in 1871, dealt with the mammals and winter birds of eastern Florida. In this article Allen set forth a number of general views on the nature of climatic variation among species and the relationship of climate to the primary biogeographic zones of the world. He held that temperature, analyzed according to isothermal lines, and humidity were the two main determinants of geographic range among species. He also affirmed the generalization that increased humidity and rainfall are associated with darker coloration in most species (Gloger’s rule).² Another of his biogeographical generalizations— that the extremities become shorter in colder climates—has become known as Allen’s rule (pp. 230–233).³ (Allen’s rule is actually a special case of Bergmann’s rule, which stales that in colder climates. races of species are larger in body size—and hence proportionally smaller in surface area—thus reducing heat loss.⁴)

Allen’s 1871 publication also proposed a revised terminology and conceptualization for major faunal areas of the globe. Objecting to the use of such zoologically inappropriate terms as “Old World” and “New World,” Allen proposed eight major biogeographic zones: (1) an Arctic Realm; (2) a North Temperate Realm; (3) an American Tropical Realm; (4) an Indo-African Tropical Realm; (5) a South American Temperate Realm; (6) an African Temperate Realm; (7) an Antarctic Realm; and (8) an Australian Realm. Within the American portion of the North Temperate Realm, he recognized eastern and western provinces. Allen’s 1871 paper received the Humboldt Scholarship of the Lawrence Scientific School and brought him recognition as a major American naturalist.

Allen’s biogeographic views inspired subsequent conflict with Alfred Russel Wallace, who endorsed Philip Lutley Sclater’s (1858) somewhat differing faunal boundaries. In his revised biogeographic subdivisions Allen (1878) emphasized the importance of geographic isolation in addition to climatic influences; and, following Wallace and Sclater, he allotted Madagascar and the Mascarcnc Islands to a separate “Lemurian Realm.” He also stressed (1876) that the most aberrant or specialized forms of zoological groups are consistently found at the periphery of the range, a view that was important for later advocates of geographic isolation as a crucial mechanism in speciation.

Although Allen believed that Darwin had overemphasized the importance of natural selection, he specifically rejected mutalionism as a mechanism of evolution (1877). Like Darwin in his later years, he thought the environment played an important role in inducing adaptive changes that are then inherited. In this respect he was basically a neo-La-marckian, as exemplified by his theory of bird migration. On this topic he argued that “what was at first a forced migration [owing to climatic changes] would become habitual, and through the heredity of habit give rise to that wonderful faculty we term the instinct of migration” (“Origin of the Instinct of Migration in Birds,” 153). Similarly, he understood what has become known as Allen’s rule in neoLamarckian terms (as the result of decreased circulation in the extremities in colder climates, presumably impeding growth) rather than in terms of natural selection favoring heat conservation (1872, 215).

In the area of biological nomenclature Allen was a conservative thinker who nevertheless adapted to change. He at first resisted the notion of using trinomials to distinguish geographic races; but eventually, under the weight of ever growing museum collections and greater evidence for meaningful geographic variants, he accepted this revision of the binomial system. He was a master at coping with the tangle of problems created by zoological synonyms, and he exerted a major influence in establishing rules to decide upon proper nomenclature. Not a brilliant thinker or a bold generalizer, Allen nevertheless possessed a patient love of detail that underlay his prolific achievements as a descriptive naturalist.

NOTES

1. The American Museum of Natural History, which had been founded in 1869 by A. S. Brickmore. one of Agassiz’s students. grew rapidly in Allen’s lifetime. In 1908 the department of birds and mammals was separated, with Chapman taking over the department of birds and Allen continuing as head of the department of mammals. By 1921, the year of Allen’s death, the combined staff of these two departments hud grown to seventeen (Chapman, “Biographical Memoir.” 5).

2. Constantm Lambert Glower, Das Abändern der vögel durch Einfluss des Kilma’s (Breslau, 1833).

3. See also Allen’s “Geographical Variation in North American Birds.” 213–215; and “The Influence of Physical Conditions in the Genesis of Species.” 116–117.

4. Carl Georg Bergmann. “Uber die Verhältnisse Wärmeökonomie der Thiere zu ihrer Grösse.” in Göttinger Studien.pt. 1 (1847). 595–708. See also Ernst Mayr. Animal Species and Evolution (Cambridge, Mass. 1963). 319–323.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A complete bibliography of Allen’s publications up to 1916 is in his Autobiographical Notes and A bibliography of the Scientific Publications of Joel Asaph Allen (New York, 1916). Frank M Chapman’s biographical memoir of Allen (see below) completes Allen’s bibliography. The most important of Allen’s publications are “On the Mammals and Winter Birds of East Florida. with an Examination of Certain Assumed Specific Characters in Birds, and a Sketch of the Bird Faunae of Eastern North America,” in Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, 2 (1871), 161–450; “Geographical Variation in North American Birds.” in Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, 15 (1872), 212–219; The American Bisons, Living and Extinct, Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Kentucky, 1 , pt. 2 (1876) and Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, 4 . no. 10 (1876); “Geographic Variation Among North American Mammals, Especially in Respect to Size” in Bulletin of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, 2 (1876), 309–344; “The Influence of Physical Conditions in the Genesis of Species.” in Radical Review, 1 (1877), 108–140; “The Geographical Distribution of the Mammalia, Considered in Relation to the Principal Ontoiogical Regions of the Earth, and the Laws That Govern the Distribution of Animal Life,” in Bulletin of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, 4 (1878), 313–377; History of North American Pinnipeds: A Monograph of the Walruses, Sections, Sea-bears and Seals of North America (Washington, D.C., 1880); “Origin of the Instinct of Migration in Birds,” in Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, 5 (1880), 151–154; and The Code of Nomenclature and Check-List of North American Birds Adopted by the American Ornithologists’ Union… (New York, 1886; rev. ed., 1908; 3rd ed., 1910). Fifteen of Allen’s publications were reprinted in Selected Works of Joel Asaph Allen (New York, 1974).

II. Secondary Literature. Other than Allen’s Autobiographicul Notes, the most complete treatment of his life and work is Frank M. Chapman, “Biographical Memoir. Joel Asaph Allen 1838–1921,” in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 21 (1927), 1–20; a shorter version was published as “In Memoriam: Joel Asaph Alien,” in The Auk, 39 (1922), 1–14. See also Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Joel Asaph Allen,” in Dictionary of American Biography, I , 197–198; Keir B. Sterling, “Introduction,” in Selected Works of Joel Asaph Allen (New York, 1974); and Witmer Stone, “Dr. J. A. Allen,” in The Auk, 38 (1921), 490–492.

Frank J. Sulloway