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SECTION D.—ZOOLOGY. 
THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR 
ADDRESS BY 
E. S. RUSSELL, O.B.E., D.Sc., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
In his Presidential Address to this Section last year, Dr. James Gray put 
forward the view, with which I entirely agree, that the organism has 
properties and potentialities as a whole which are not reducible to the 
properties shown at the chemical level. He maintained that ‘ the con- 
ception of the organism as a single living entity is or should be the more 
peculiar attribute of experimental biology.’ We should study not only 
the action of the parts in isolation, as does the physiologist, but also and 
more particularly the activity of the animal as a whole. ‘Thus we should 
not rest content with a knowledge of the mechanism of muscular con- 
traction or of the propagation of the nervous impulse ; we must study 
also and before all the action of the neuro-muscular system as a whole, 
as, for example, in locomotion—and, I would add, in behaviour generally. 
I propose to continue the discussion so ably begun by Dr. Gray, and 
to deal particularly with that whole-activity of the organism which we call 
its behaviour. 
The study of animal behaviour has been somewhat neglected in this 
country, and this is all the more regrettable since first-rate pioneer work 
has been done by Prof. C. Lloyd Morgan and the late Prof. L.'T. Hobhouse. 
Furthermore, it has been largely divorced from the general study of 
zoology, and handed over to the physiologist and the psychologist, 
neither of whom is, as a rule, sufficient of a naturalist to appreciate the 
full biological significance of the behaviour observed in the laboratory. 
It is of course obvious that an animal’s behaviour is one of the most 
important things about it, and if the zoologist wishes to understand how 
his animal lives, maintains itself, and carries on the race, the first thing 
he should study is its behaviour in the field. It is also clear that a 
thorough knowledge of the bionomics or ecology of the animal is quite 
essential for the interpretation of its behaviour in the experimental 
conditions of the laboratory. 
We are meeting to-day in a zoological department which has always 
recognised the fundamental importance of the study of behaviour and 
