Vernon Lyman Kellogg


Vernon Lyman Kellogg was an American entomologist, evolutionary biologist, and science administrator. A major contribution was his study of bird lice and their hosts. He established the Department of Zoology at Stanford University in 1894, and served as the first permanent secretary of the National Research Council in Washington, D.C.
Kellogg was an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Early life

Kellogg was born on December 1, 1867, in Emporia, Kansas. His father was Lyman Beecher Kellogg, first president of the Kansas State Normal School, and former Kansas Attorney General.
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.

Career

From 1894 to 1920, Kellogg was professor of entomology at Stanford University, where he established the Department of Zoology. Kellogg specialized in insect taxonomy and economic entomology. Herbert Hoover was among his students, and Ruby Green Bell and Florence E. Bemis worked in his lab. A major contribution was the study of bird ectoparasites and the suggestion that he made that their speciation may be linked with that of their hosts. In 1896 he suggested that the lice might be jumping from one host to another. He was particularly noting jumps between apparently unrelated hosts. In 1902 Kellogg and Kuwana examined the mallophaga of the birds of the Galapagos islands and began to compare them with those from the mainland. By 1913 he had constructed an idea of cospeciation or coevolution influenced also by the work of Heinrich Fahrenholz.

Vernon Kellogg House

He was one of the professors to build a summer home on what became known as "Professors' Row" in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. The home is a wood-framed redwood Craftsman-style cottage built in 1906. He was good friends with Stanford University president David Starr Jordan who also lived there.
In 1908, Kellogg married Charlotte Hoffman and the two welcomed their only child, Jean Kellogg Dickie, in 1910.
Kellogg was a conservationist, an officer of the Sierra Club, and enjoyed outdoor recreation. In addition to his publications on lice, Kellogg wrote two books. Darwinism ToDay was a summary of all the major evolutionary theories and a general defense of Darwinism. The second book is titled Headquarters Nights .
In July 1913, Kellogg directed the play Fire, by author Mary Austin, at the Forest Theater in Carmel-by-the-Sea.
His academic career was interrupted by two years 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 that the ideas could be beaten only 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,, from 1921 to 1933. At his retirement he became Secretary Emeritus.
A Liberty ship built in the United States during World War II was named SS Vernon L. Kellogg.

Works

Common Injurious Insects of Kansas.

Taxon named in his honor