Reprinted from: The Psychological Record, 1973, 23, 423-425.

The professional life of W. N. Kellogg was marked by research contributions in a number of areas and by his impact on a relatively large group of students, undergraduate and graduate, who were influenced both in his classes and his laboratories.

Among my first and certainly most vivid memories as a graduate student at Indiana University were those of meeting, in the fall of my first year, J. R. Kantor and W. N. Kellogg. Two more different people would be hard to imagine-one the complete theorist and the other the complete empiricist. Both were essential to the education of graduate students at Indiana of the era, and now that one of them is gone, all of us who were there have an increased sense of the importance of that period at Indiana. Kellogg went on to Florida State University in 1950 and carved out a new and distinguished career there.

Winthrop Niles Kellogg was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on April 13, 1898. The place confounds us, for most of us outlanders thought of him as the Ur-Hoosier. However, as the chronology of his life goes, he was by birth a suburban New Yorker and a latecomer to Indiana, though he did indeed have Hoosier roots. He was a student at Cornell University during the academic year 1916-1917, but to anyone who knew Kellogg even in his middle years, it would be inconceivable that he could neglect the adventure and challenge of the Great War. He enlisted and spent 2 years as a First Lieutenant in the Aviation Service of the U.S. Army and as a flyboy in the heroic generation of that breed. He acquired, as was common to those who practiced flying then, injuries but also what was less common, the Croix de Guerre. During World War 11 be was a major in the Army Air Force, and he had just returned from a tour of duty in 1944 when I met him.

He married Luella Dorothy Agger of Indianapolis in December of 1920, and that was for Indiana University and psychology as a science a most important step, for it determined a scientific partnership and overdetermined that Kellogg was to be a Hoosier. He received his AB from Indiana University in 1922, and after a brief episode of journalism, teaching, and beginning a family, be departed, as did so many would-be experimental psychologists of the time, for Columbia University. There he took an AM degree in 1927 and a PhD under Woodworth in 1929, His dissertation was on psychophysics, and it was published in Columbia's old Archives of Psychology series. Characteristically, his psychophysical work was both conservative and forward looking. It was modem in that it anticipated signal detection theory and the demise of the concept of the threshold. It explored unusual. methods, such as the use of reaction time, for measuring what would now be called detectability. It was old fashioned in that it was purely empirical and ventured not far beyond the concepts then available. In method Kellogg came close to something like the rationale for signal detection theory, but I suspect he would have retreated from anything so general and speculative.

His most important scientific work is divided into three main phases: (a) The Ape and the Child, (b) work on motor conditioning, and (c) comparative marine psychology with an emphasis upon the capacities of the porpoise. His greatest fame was associated with the comparative psychological development of two primate species, the chimpanzee, Pan satyrus, and Homo sapiens. The latter was represented by the Kellogg's second son, Donald, and the chimpanzee by the immortal Gua. A detailed, well-recorded, and objective account of a year being raised together in the Kellogg home made these two not only famous beyond mere scientific recording (a film made by the Kelloggs is to educational films something like what Birth of a Nation is to the movie industry at large) but established at a deeper, more sophisticated level the debate between biological and psychological factors in the make-up of the individual. No one study could settle that debate or even move it very far, but the book produced under the joint authorship of Winthrop and Luella Kellogg was as important as anything of its time.

I came upon the scene when the Conditioning Laboratory at Indiana University, established in 1936, was a going concern. A whole series of important and pioneering studies on central and peripheral neural functions in conditioning bad already come out of that laboratory. I became involved in the spinal conditioning problem, one that fascinated Kellogg both because of its scientific importance and because of the opportunity for mechanical dexterity and gadgetry. One of the happiest days of my life as a graduate student occurred when Henry Pronko and I discovered the enormous amplifying power to be achieved by moving pneumatic recording from tambours directly to muscle preparation. This greatly pleased Kellogg. To this day, I believe we achieved a level of sensitivity at least equal to the thermionic amplification possible in the time.

Kellogg's last work is still something of a mystery to me. My own interests had turned in other directions, and my major contact with what he was doing was an occasional article in Time, a newspaper story, the many reviews of his book Porpoises and Sonar in the popular and semipopular press, and occasionally one of his own superb pieces in Science. Even in retirement be continued as a valued Associate Editor of The Psychological Record. I saw enough to know that his great fund of common sense was a strong asset at a time when there was an enormous amount of credulous speculation that attributed human functions, including a highly developed language, to the porpoise.

I regret that Kellogg did not write more popular books. His training as a journalist came through in his writings. There are few scientists who could write experimental papers with the clarity of Kellogg. He could communicate the tedious methods of science with accuracy and intelligibility. Both The Ape and the Child and Porpoises and Sonar were popular successes. He could have written textbooks that would have been highly successful, but be preferred to spend his time in the laboratory.

Kellogg came to Indiana University as an assistant professor in 1930. He rose very quickly and was a full professor by 1937. Except for the period during World War 11, be remained at Indiana until 1950. In 1950 he moved to Florida State University, then just recently developed to university status and being propelled into graduate work. The acquisition of Kellogg was an important step in developing a significant new psychology department. Both of the Kelloggs were friends of at least a generation of graduate students at Indiana, and since they could not have changed all that much, at Florida State as well. One of the saddest things to report in an obituary of Winthrop Kellogg, deceased at Sarasota, Florida, in the summer of 1972 after enjoying nearly 10 years of retirement from active teaching, is that his wife's death occurred within a few months of his and that both of them were followed by the death of Donald Agger Kellogg in January, 1973. They are survived by their married daughter, Shirley Mae.