CHAPTER XI 



The Nervous Organisation and Behaviour of Shore 



Animals 



Shore animals are favourite subjects of experiment in 

 connection with the study of " behaviour " and have 

 furnished very interesting and important results. These 

 results have been obtained not by psychologists in the usual 

 sense of the term, but by biologists v»^ho, untrammelled by the 

 methods of traditional psychology and free from considera- 

 tions of " mind " and "consciousness," have confined them- 

 selves to a purely objective study of the reactions of the animal 

 to its environment. In consequence of the adoption of 

 this method of inquiry, the whole subject of animal behaviour 

 is now on a better and very much sounder basis ; there is — 

 or should be at least — an end to anthropomorphism and the 

 often fanciful interpretations of the older naturalists no longer 

 have a place. 



Our object, then, in this chapter is to illustrate the manner 

 in which the special conditions of the tidal area have 

 influenced behaviour, so far as critical observation and 

 experiment have made this apparent. Since, however, 

 the behaviour of an animal is essentially a function of its 

 nervous system, we cannot do better than take as the founda- 

 tion for our study a description of the nervous organisation 

 and sense organs of the most important shore types. To this 

 we will add an account of such experiments as tend to throw 

 light upon the level reached by behaviour in the respective 

 groups. 



Nervous Organisation of Shore Forms.— The type of 

 nervous organisation most familiar to us, viz. that of 



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