Notes on the Psychology of Fishes

Abstract

LAST year Dr. C. 0. Whitman of the University of Chicago delivered a very able lecture on Animal Behavior, it being one of the biological lectures from the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Holl, Mass.' In the leading paragraph Dr. Whitman very truly points out the fact that s animal behavior, long an attractive theme with students of natural history, has in recent times become the center of interest to investigators in the field of psychogenesis. The study of habits, instincts, and intelligence in the lower animals was not for a long time considered to have any fundamental relation to the study of man's mental development. Biologists were left to cultivate the field alone, and psychologists only recently discovered how vast and essential were the interests to which their science could lay claim (p. 286). This is as true a statement as has been made in the premises in question in any connection, and the person who has paid any attention to psychological literature during the last ten years is well aware of the fact that in the discussions that have been going on there on the subject of instinct and intelligence, the psychologist has been compelled over and over again to draw upon the observations made by the biologist upon the habits and physiology of animals in order to lay down the very base for his theories in regard to the aforesaid faculties. Professor Whitman's recent researches have lent a powerful impulse to the interest taken in this subject, the more so from the fact that being a trained biologist himself, and possessed of a keen appreciation of the modern advances in psychology, he has been enabled to attack the question in the double capacity of naturalist and psychologist. So far as the writer's present information carries him, the researches of this observer have been chiefly devoted to the studying of the