200 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ANIMALS 



than it usually receives when problems of leadership 

 are discussed. 



While those of us who have been engaged in these 

 studies have probably never been wholly unaware 

 of the possibility of amusing cross-references to man, 

 I must insist that our motivation has not been that 

 of making an oblique attack upon human social re- 

 lations. Rather, we have found problems concerned 

 with the social organization of birds and other ani- 

 mals interesting and important on their own ac- 

 count. 



We have, of course, a feeling that different ani- 

 mals have much in common in group psychology 

 and in sociology, as well as in more distinctly physio- 

 logical processes. It is the viewpoint of general 

 physiology that we cannot understand the working 

 and the possibilities of the human nervous system, 

 for example, without study of the functioning of 

 the nervous systems of many other kinds of animals. 

 Similarly well-integrated information has been com- 

 piled concerning general and comparative psychol- 

 ogy. From the same point of view some of us have 

 been trying to develop a general sociology, which 

 even in its present imperfect state allows human 

 social reactions to be viewed in part as the peculiar 

 human development of social tendencies which also 

 have their peculiar developments among insects. 



