2 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM VOL. 125 
interdisciplinary, that is, it is the proper concern of “so-called” 
biologists, ‘‘so-called” anthropologists, and ‘‘so-called”’ paleontologists. 
Such an unorthodox area for research can obviously best be performed 
in unorthodox places, perhaps one reason why Hooton’s hope (cited 
by Napier) that primate biology would become established as a 
separate teaching division in universities has not been realized. Uni- 
versities as a whole are largely losing their ability to be innovative, 
thus putting more pressure on smaller institutions like private labora- 
tories or museums to maintain their fundamental reasons for being. 
I once characterized the Smithsonian Institution as populated by 
specialists who were inheritors of a tradition of the “unfashionable in 
pursuit of the unconventional.’ The urgent need for studies such as 
those outlined in this paper is underscored by Dr. Napier’s concise 
account of the rapidly diminishing status of many of the primate 
species. Conservation is by no means a subject to be ignored by 
scientists. Environmental studies make conservationists out of the 
most realistic among us. Primate biology thus becomes one of the 
most urgent of all interdisciplinary concerns of science today. 
S. Ditton Ripiey 
Secretary 
Smithsonian Institution 
Primate biology as a scientific endeavor is unique inasmuch as it 
provides a mirror into which man may look to discern the nature of 
his own species. 
Nonhuman primates, occupying an intermediate position between 
other mammals and man, serve as a constant reminder of the con- 
tinuity of mammalian life. Thomas Henry Huxley in 1876 expressed 
the essence of this special primate role: 
Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so extraordinary a series of grada- 
tions as this—leading us insensibly from the crown and summit of the animal 
creation down to creatures from which there is but a step, as it seems, to the 
lowest, smallest and least intelligent of placental mammals. 
The significance of this relationship between man and the non- 
human primates is—to translate and paraphrase the late Earnest 
Hooton’s happy plagiarism of the poet Terence—that ‘‘anything to 
do with primates is something to do with man.” It is inherently 
probable, therefore, that any basic concept developed in the fields 
of primate physiology, psychology, or therapeutics, for example, 
can be applied also to man. This tenet now widely appreciated provides 
the rationale for the extensive use of primates as experimental subjects 
in medical and sociological research. 
