AUTHOE'S PREFACE. 



Animal psychology is regarded by many somewhat 

 contemptuously as a sort of amusement, from which 

 nothing worth speaking of can be expected for the ad- 

 vancement of our modern science of the mind. I do not 

 believe this. In the first place, it is quite wrong to judge 

 animal psychology mainly from its value for the inter- 

 pretation of the mind of man, making secondary the 

 independent interest to which it lays claim. Yet, apart 

 from this, such a study is valuable to the anthropologist 

 in many ways, though it must be admitted that but little 

 has as yet been accomplished in this direction. Unfor- 

 tunately, many of the works hitherto published on the 

 subject of animal psychology labour under the disadvan- 

 tage of being strongly biased, and suffer also from a 

 lack of method. Their authors, justly indignant at the 

 arrogance of man in despising the animals and claiming 

 for themselves all the higher and more refined attri- 

 butes, naturally wish to prove that animals, too, possess 

 a high degree of intelligence and feeling; they accord- 

 ingly emphasize the resemblance of animals to man, and 

 their work becomes an interesting collection of anecdotes 

 of specially gifted individual animals — collections, no 

 doubt, possessing much intrinsic worth but of little value 

 2 xvii 



