The Early Animal Behaviorists: Prolegomenon to Ethology

Abstract

THAT ZOOLOGISTS pioneered the observational study of animal behavior while psychologists developed the laboratory approach is a generally held assumption which I have found impossible to verify. Even as late as the end of the nineteenth century the academic psychologists were interested in animals chiefly to the extent that they exhibited a precursor of the normal adult human mind.1 The eventual adoption of animal behavior as a scientific area of investigation in psychology is traceable to the fact that students of prominent men began to use animals as subjects for dissertation research.2 The academic zoologists of the same period were just as slow to make animal behavior an academic discipline, and when they did integrate ethology they did so partially on the excuse that behavior could be used as a taxonomic indicator.3 Actually, both psychologists and zoologists borrowed problems and techniques from those amateurs who were the major contributors to the science. It is the essentially amateur standing of the early animal behaviorists that I wish to emphasize in this episodic introduction to the history of a scientific contribution that has so far been unheralded.