Vernon Lyman Kellogg

Vernon Lyman Kellogg

Vernon Kellogg encounters two refugees on a Moscow street, while on a humanitarian mission.

Vernon Lyman Kellogg (December 1, 1867 in Emporia, Kansas – August 8, 1937 in Hartford, Connecticut) was a U.S. entomologist, evolutionary biologist, and science administrator.

He studied under Francis Snow at the University of Kansas, under John Henry Comstock at Stanford University, and under Rudolf Leuckart at the University of Leipzig in Germany.

From 1894 to 1920 Kellogg was professor of entomology at Stanford University Kellogg specialized in insect taxonomy and economic entomology. Herbert Hoover was among his students.

His academic career was interrupted by two years (1915 and 1916) spent in Brussels as director of Hoover's humanitarian American Commission for Relief in Belgium. Initially a pacifist, Kellogg dined with the officers of the German Supreme Command. He became shocked by the grotesque Social Darwinist motivation for the German war machine - the creed of survival of the fittest based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the Gospel of the German intellectuals. Kellogg decided these ideas could only be beaten by force and, using his connections with America's political elite, began to campaign for American intervention in the war. He published an account of his conversations in the book Headquarters Nights.

After the war, he served as the first permanent secretary of the National Research Council in Washington, D.C..

He served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, from 1921–1933.

A cargo ship built in the United States during World War II was named SS Vernon L. Kellogg.

Works

• Common injurious insects of Kansas (Lawrence University, 1892).
• With J.H. Comstock, The elements of insect anatomy; an outline for the use of students in the entomological laboratories of Cornell University and Leland Stanford Junior University (Comstock Pub. Co., Ithaca, 1895).
• With J.H. Comstock, The elements of insect anatomy (Comstock Pub. Co., Ithaca, 1899).
• A list of the biting lice (Mallophaga) taken from birds and mammals of North America (Gov’t print. off., Washington, 1899).
• With Oliver Peebles Jenkins (1850-1935), Lessons in nature study (The Whitaker & Ray Company, San Francisco, 1900).
• With David Starr Jordan, Animal Life: A First Book of Zoölogy (D. Appelton and Co., New York, 1900).
• Elementary zoology (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1901, reedited in 1902).
• First lessons in zoology (H. Holt and Company, New York, 1903).
• With D.S. Jordan, Evolution and animal life; an elementary discussion of facts, processes, laws and theories relating to the life and evolution of animals (D. Appleton and company, New York, 1907).
• Darwinism to-day; a discussion of present-day scientific criticism of the Darwinian selection theories, together with a brief account of the principal other proposed auxiliary and alternative theories of species-forming (H. Holt and Company, New York, 1907). The first chapter was The Death-Bad of Darwinism, evoking the title of a book written by Eberhard Dennert, a German and anti-darwinian scientist whom with Kennog sympathized.
• Insect stories (D. Appleton and company, New York & London, 1908, reedited in 1923).
• With D.S. Jordan, The scientific aspects of Luther Burbank’s work (A. M. Robertson, San Francisco, 1909).
• American insects (H. Holt and Company, New York, 1905, reedited in 1908).
• The animals and man (New York, H. Holt and Company, 1905, reedited with contributions from Mary Isabel McCracken in 1911).
• With Gordon Floyd Ferris (1893-1958), The Anoplura and Mallophaga of North American mammals (Stanford University, 1915).
• With Rennie Wilbur Doane (1871-1942), Elementary textbook of economic zoology and entomology (H. Holt and Company, New York, 1915). Free online version.
• With Alonzo Engelbert Taylor (1871-1949), The food problem (Macmillan Company, New York, 1917).
• Headquarters nights; a record of conversations and experiences at the headquarters of the German army in France and Belgium (The Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston, v. 1917).
• Fighting starvation in Belgium (Page & company, New York, Doubleday, 1918).
• Herbert Hoover, the man and his work (D. Appleton and company, New York et Londres 1920).
• With des chansons de Charlotte Kellogg, Nuova : or, The new bee, a story for children of five to fifty (Houghton Mifflin, Boston et New York, v. 1920).
• Human life as the biologist sees it (H. Holt and company, New York, 1922).
• Mind and heredity (Princeton University Press, 1923).
• Evolution: the way of man. D. Appleton, New York.
• Eugenics and Militarism, presented at First International Eugenics Congress, 1912, published in Atlantic Monthly July 1913.
• "Bionomics of War: Military Selection and Race Determination", Social Hygiene, 1/1 (December 1914)
• The Food Problem with Alonzo Engelbert Taylor (1871-1949), (The Macmillan company, New York, 1917).
• Germany in the War and After, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1919.

References

• Arnold Mallis (1971). American Entomologists. Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick) : xvii + 549 p.

• Mark A. Largent, These are Times of Scientific Ideals: Vernon Lyman Kellogg and Scientific Activism, 1890-1930. Dissertation: University of Minnesota, 2000.

External links

• Brief biography
• National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
• Works by Vernon Lyman Kellogg at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Vernon Lyman Kellogg at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Vernon Lyman Kellogg Papers at the Hoover Institution Archives
• Picture of the SS Vernon L Kellogg