Background

Ethnicity: Kellogg's ancestors came to the United States from England.

Vernon Lyman Kellogg was born on December 1, 1867, in Emporia, Kansas, United States. He was the son of a college professor, Lyman Beecher Kellogg, and Abigail Homer.

Education

Although Kellogg had shown considerable interest in the animals of his native Kansas, he intended to become a journalist when he entered the University of Kansas. At the university, he worked on the local newspaper with his close friend and fellow student William Allen White. But the persuasive influence of entomologist Francis Huntington Snow, chancellor of the university, impelled him to follow a scientific career. Kellogg received a Bachelor of Arts degree at Kansas in 1889 and a Master of Arts from the same university in 1892. He later studied at Cornell University, and at Leipzig and Paris.

Career

In 1890 Kellogg became an assistant professor of entomology and secretary to Snow. He became an associate professor in 1893. In 1894 Kellogg went to Stanford University at the urging of the prominent entomologist John Henry Comstock, who spent three months there each year. Kellogg became a professor of entomology and head of the department at Stanford in 1895. During World War I he served with the Commission for Relief in Belgium, headed by his former student Herbert Hoover, and in other relief and peace activities. Kellogg resigned his professorship in 1920 to become permanent secretary of the National Research Council.

Achievements

• Vernon Lyman Kellogg is remembered as a pioneer biologist and zoologist who accumulated the largest collection of Mallophaga in the United States and published extensively on them. His work on silkworms was a pioneer study in genetics in America. He classified the Dipteran family Blepharoceridae, and he also investigated Lepidoptera scales and the morphology and development of mouth parts in insects. He wrote, alone or with Jordan, about a dozen books on evolution and general biology.
  
  A Liberty ship built in the United States during World War II was named SS Vernon L. Kellogg.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Headquarters Nights 1917
  • International biology 1925
  • The Animans and Man 1911
  • First Lessons in Zoology 1903
  • Germany in the War and After 1919
  • Losses of Life in Modern Wars, Austria-Hungary, France and Military Selection and Race Deterioration 1916
  • Darwinism Today 1907
  • Human Life as the Biologist Sees It 1922
  • Common injurious insects of Kansas 1892
  • The Scientific Aspects Of Luther Burbank's Work 1909
  • Evolution and Animal Life 1907
  • The Elements Of Insect Anatomy 1895
  • American Insects 1904
  • Animals: A Text-Book of Zoology 1907
  • Isolation or cooperation in research 1926
  • Suggestions to Teachers, Designed to Accompany Animal Life 1901
  • In and Out of Florence 1910
  • Insect Stories 1908
  • The Food Problem 1918
  • Nuova: Or, The New Bee 1920
  • The Development And Homologies Of The Mouth Parts Of Insects 1902

Politics

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.

Connections

In 1908, Kellogg married Charlotte Hoffman. Their only child, Jean Kellogg, was born in 1910.

Father:

Lyman Beecher Kellogg

Mother:

Abigail Homer

Spouse:

Charlotte Hoffman

Daughter:

Jean Kellogg

Friend:

William Allen White

colleague:

Francis Huntington Snow

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 7
  1973