ROLE OF ETHOLOGY 243 



parative psychology and comparative behavior. It is important 

 that it should become widely recognized that this discipline really 

 means, as Thorpe (1958) also says, ''the scientific study of animal 

 behaviour,'' and not merely, as Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Kramer (1958) 

 say, "an approach to the study of animal behaviour, derived from 

 the study of instinctive movements." This restricted definition is 

 the basis only of the so-called modern ethology associated par- 

 ticularly with the names of Lorenz, Tinbergen, and Baerends, but 

 which is equally the basis of many other schools of comparative 

 psychology or behavior. 



At this point it had been the intention to give a general account 

 of the development of modem ethology and its concepts, but at 

 the Scripps Institution (1956) Symposium on Perspectives in 

 Marine Biology Thorpe (1958) gave such an account and how he 

 visualized its possible development in the field of marine biology. 

 It is therefore neither necessary nor desirable that this ground 

 should be gone over again. 



Lehrman (1953) and Kortlandt (1955, 1959) especially have 

 criticized the claims and concepts of the modern ethologists, and 

 Schneirla (1952) and Aronson (1957) and others have cautioned 

 against the uncritical acceptance of their causal explanations. 



Nonetheless the Lorenz school of ethology has brought into 

 sharp focus and tried to systematize many behavioral phenomena 

 which do not fit readily into existing psychological or physiological 

 explanations of organismic activity. It has also brought into 

 prominence procedural techniques which ought perhaps to have 

 been adopted long ago and for reasons quite different from, but 

 complementary to, those given by themselves. 



If one takes a small area of shore, plots its microclimates, as 

 expressed in terms of temperature, lengths of exposure, type of 

 rock surface, slope, currents, etc., then notes the numerical distri- 

 bution of an animal or various animals occupying the different 

 niches and so establishes a mathematical relationship, this is 

 ecological work. But if, either in the field or in the laboratory, one 

 tries to find out why an animal seeks these situations, or studies 

 what it does in unusual circumstances designed to disclose the 

 behavioral or, if you like and speak more loosely, psychological 



