Donald R. Griffin was bom in 1915 in Southampton, 

 New York. He was educated at Phillips Academy, 

 Andover, Massachusetts, and at Harvard University 

 (B.S., 1938; M.A., 1940; Ph.D., 1942), where he was 

 variously Junior Fellow and Research Associate until 

 1946. Grifl&n taught physiology and zoology at Cornell 

 University until 1953, and since then he has been Pro- 

 fessor of Zoology at Harvard. 



His enthusiasm for science began as a boy when he 

 lived on Cape Cod. "I always found small mammals 

 enough like ourselves," Griffin says, "to feel that I could 

 understand what their Uves would be like, and yet dif- 

 ferent enough to make it a sort of adventure and ex- 

 ploration to see what they were doing. CoUege courses 

 plus reading and conversations with an unusually wise 

 and stimulating group of friends and advisers led my 

 interests to include the physiological mechanisms that 

 operate in the bodies of animals and men." 



Since it soon became clear to him that many of the 

 problems of biology might be solved by direct applica- 

 tion of the methods and instruments of physics, he be- 

 gan, first, to band bats, then to study and record the 

 ultrasonic cries with which they navigate. "By a most 

 fortunate accident," he says, "I was a student at Harvard 

 College, where, in 1938, one of the few physicists then 

 actively studying sounds above the range of human hear- 

 ing was willing to let my bats register their ultrasonic 

 sounds on his apparatus. This was G. W. Pierce, and a 

 casual visit to his laboratory with a cage full of bats be- 

 gan the line of research that forms the subject of this 

 book. 



"In the same years," he continues, "I was also study- 

 ing migratory birds, first by homing experiments in 

 which they were carried some distance from their nests 

 and released. Many of the sea birds studied in this way 



