2 INTRODUCTION 



Hence we find among writers of the period mentioned a 

 tendency to interpret the actions of animals as the outcome 

 of highly developed psychical faculties, and to accept rather 

 too uncritically stories indicative of great sagacity on the 

 part of animals with the end of showing that the brute 

 creation does not stand so very far below us after all. The 

 works of Romanes on Mental Evolution in Animals and 

 Animal Intelligence are typical of the period and its tenden- 

 cies toward anthropomorphism, which is now the bete noir 

 of every dabbler in the subject of animal behavior. While 

 Romanes has been criticized with a certain amount of 

 justice for basing conclusions on anecdotes from more or 

 less questionable sources he has the merit of bringing to- 

 gether a large number of facts regarding animal intelligence 

 and of giving an able and lucid account of the general course 

 of mental evolution, and there is no doubt that had his 

 life extended into the period of more careful and accurate 

 experimentation he would have been among the first to 

 appreciate and encourage the newer animal psychology. 



The advent of experimental psychology with its various 

 appliances for observing and recording the manifestations 

 of mental phenomena, the study of the functions of the 

 nervous system by the experimental methods of the phy- 

 siologists, and the growing vogue of methods of experimental 

 analysis in biology in general could not fail to have a marked 

 influence on the study of the mental life of animals. After 

 the scientific world had comfortably settled down in the 

 belief in continuous mental evolution, and the subject had 

 mainly lost its controversial interest, attention became more 

 strongly directed to the analysis of animal behavior with the 

 end of explaining why animals act as they do. Then came 

 the period of reflexes and tropisms and the analysis of com- 

 plex behavior into simpler processes, with which we are now 



