Plates for Joseph Asaph Allen’s Unpublished Monograph on the Mammalian Orders Cete and Sirenia and a Record of the Search for the Manuscript

Abstract

In 1882 Joel Asaph Allen published his “Preliminary List of Works and Papers Relating to the Mammalian Orders Cete and Sirenia” as a Bulletin of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. That list, consisting of 1013 bibliographic records in chronological order from 1495 to 1840, was said to be one-third of the actual bibliography of a monograph on cetacean and sirenians on which Allen was working. Extensive archival searching has produced only the unpublished plates of the work. We have concluded that the monograph does not reside in any of the logical archival repositories.