With Allis’s support, Whitman started the Journal of Morphology in 1897 for long, almost monographic articles complete with elaborate illustrations. In addition, Whitman and his student William Morton Wheeler (who had also worked at the Allis Lake Laboratory) started a second journal for shorter articles and reports that could quickly appear in print. This was seen as a companion for the Journal of Morphology and was intended to embrace the entire field of animal biology.
At first they called it the Zöological Bulletin, but after the first two years of publication in 1898 and 1899, the title changed to The Biological Bulletin. This also fit with the fact that the journal started out independently and then in 1890 became affiliated informally with the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, of which Whitman served as first director starting in 1888. The MBL also published its series of evening lectures throughout the 1890s, as The Biological Lectures Delivered at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Holl. Whitman encouraged MBL investigators to publish in the first two journals and the lecturers to contribute their lectures to the third. Very quickly, Whitman had helped the United States establish itself as a place where serious scientific research was done in the life sciences.
Source: Maienschein, Jane, "The Biological Bulletin". Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2008-10-24). ISSN: 1940-5030 http://embryo.asu.edu/handle/10776/1952
