192 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



realities. Arm-chair animal psychology has no doubt been evolved 

 from insufficient data — an affair of words rather than of things — never- 

 theless great good has resulted for all, as we have been brought to what 

 may be termed the experimental and critical age of comparative 

 psychology. 



It was most fortunate, that as successor to Romanes in Great 

 Britain, the subject should have been taken up by a man so thoroughly 

 prepared for his task as Lloyd Morgan, who is at once a biologist, a 

 psychologist and a master of the pen. His works, in spite of the 

 critical acumen they show, can be read by anyone with a moderate 

 knowledge of biology and a sympathy with the subject of animal intel- 

 ligence. And that has given them a wide circulation, a most important 

 matter for the education of large numbers of persons to broader and 

 truer views of the relations of man and his fellow-creatures. This is 

 surely of the utmost importance, if we are to look to a right mental 

 attitude as of more to man than food and raiment. 



Still later we see a rise within a very few years of a class of investi- 

 gators, that I presume would prefer to be called the experimental 

 school, but whom I shall designate the laboratory school and the indivi- 

 duals the laborators, for I do not grant that they were the first 

 experimenters. Their researches have practically all been such as can 

 be readily carried out in the laboratory, a fact which explains at once 

 to a large extent, their excellencies and their defects, especially the 

 latter. This school has, on the whole, been destructive. If it has 

 an the one hand brought few bricks to the pile, it has on the other 

 boldly attempted to overturn some edifices that were relatively of 

 ancient date and regarded by many with considerable respect. The 

 most extreme representatives of this school deny to animals, not only 

 reascriing and every form of intelligence proper, but even imitation and 

 memory. The whole psychic life of animals not to be explained by 

 instinct, was for them the result of the operation of the law of associa- 

 tion of ideas; all else was illusion and delusion; previous workers were 

 regarded as prejudiced in favour of animals; they were adjudged to 

 have written as if they held a brief for animals as creatures that 

 mentally were very like man, differing not so much in qualities as in 

 the degree to which they were developed. 



All this is wrong, utterly wrong, according to this very modem 

 school, and claiming that anecdotes were rather misleading than help- 

 ful, that observations were of little value at the best, it was maintained 

 that there had really, up till then, been no experiments worthy of the 

 name, and that now, for the first time, was there something to be pre- 

 sented on which reliance might be placed, in spite of the fact tha»t 

 some, at all events, of the experimenters had neither biological 



