Vernon Lyman Kellogg

Herbert Hoover: the Man and His Work (Dodo Press) Vernon Lyman Kellogg

Vernon Myman Lyman Kellogg (1867-1937) was a U. S. entomologist, evolutionary biologist, and science administrator. He studied under Francis Snow at the University of Kansas. From 1894 to 1920 he was professor of entomology at Stanford University. He 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 Darwinian motivation for the German war machine - "the creed of natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the Gospel of the German intellectuals". He 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 (1917). His other works include: New Mallophaga (1896), Elementary Zoology (1901), Genera Insectorum (1906), Insect Stories (1908) and Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work (1920).