ALLEN, JOEL ASAPH (1838-1921), American zoologist, was born in Springfield, Mass., on July io, 1838. He attended Wilbraham academy and then studied zoology under Louis Agassiz in the Lawrence scientific school, Harvard university. From 1865 to 1869 and again in 1873 he was a member of scien tific expeditions to Florida, the Rocky mountains and Brazil. In connection with these expeditions he collected much zoological material on which he made extensive investigations, the results of which were published chiefly in the Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History. His Mammals and Winter Birds of Eastern Florida 0870 won for him the Humboldt scholarship of the Lawrence scientific school, and placed him in the front rank of American naturalists. In 1871-73 he was lecturer and in 1873-85 assistant in ornithology in the Museum of Compara tive Zoology, Harvard. From 1885 until his death he was curator of mammalogy and ornithology in the Arnerican Museum of Natural History, New York city. During this period he pub lished a large number of papers on birds and mammals and for more than 3o years gave editorial supervision to all the zoologi cal publications of the museum, about 6o volumes. He took a leading part in organizing the American Ornithologists' Union, edited three issues of its Check List of North American Birds, and from 1884 to 1912 edited its official journal The Auk, to which he contributed more than 600 papers. His Autobiographical Notes (1916) contains a bibliography of his scientific writings, including some 1,400 titles. He died at Cornwall-on-Hudson, Aug. 29, 192i.
Among his more important works, other than those before mentioned, are The American Bisons Living and Extinct 0876); with Eliott Coues, Monographs on North American Rodentia 0877); History of North American Pinnipeds (188o); Mammals of Patagonia (19o5); The Influence of Physical Conditions on the Genesis of Species (19o5); and Ontogenic and Other Varia tions in Musk-Oxen (1913).