DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY 



497 



standard Y type, the elevated insect 

 maze, and various irregular patterns 

 which he employed extensively in connec- 

 tion with his studies on the sensory 

 capacities of the ant. To him should go 

 the credit also for first making definite 

 use of the puzzle device or problem method 

 under laboratory conditions. He con- 

 structed his varied problem apparatus 

 upon the principle that the best way to 

 test animal intelligence is "to interpose 

 f"some obstacle which a little ingenuity 

 would enable them to overcome" between 

 animals and such natural incentives as 

 (food, the young, freedom, etc. Although 

 i the various devices of Lubbock were 

 especially adapted to insect manipulation, 

 this principle is the fundamental one 

 involved in most later types of problem 

 apparatus (2.1 1) as used for all sorts of 

 animals. Lubbock not only originated 

 two of our most important general 

 laboratory methods — maze and problem 

 situation — but also invented a most 

 ingenious glass-covered nest for ants in 

 which he kept some groups under con- 

 tinuous observation, under fairly normal 

 living conditions, for over seven years. 

 He claims to have been the first to mark 

 particular ants and record their individual 

 behavior on an extensive scale. He 

 checked up by his more exact methods the 

 conclusions of earlier and contemporary 

 observers of insect life and showed that 

 the current anthropomorphic interpreta- 

 tions in this field were usually based upon 

 careless or insufficient observation. His 

 own results, arranged in tabular form, 

 appear modern indeed in comparison with 

 the reports of most other naturalists of the 

 time. 



Lubbock made extensive use of the 

 "preference method" in his study of the 

 visual range, color vision, and other 

 sensory capacities of insects, but he 

 adopted a critical attitude in the matter of 



interpreting his findings. The preference 

 method had been used earlier by Bert, 

 Graber (135) and others in attempting to 

 determine discrimination ability in various 

 types of invertebrates. As commonly 

 employed in color vision work, the 

 animals to be tested were equally distrib- 

 uted over the floor of a long narrow box 

 covered with colored glass arranged in 

 spectral order. Withdrawal from, or 

 collection in a given section — under a 

 given colored glass — was usually inter- 

 preted to mean not merely differential 

 sensitivity, but genuine preference based 

 upon pleasure-pain or even aesthetic 

 factors. Lubbock insisted that the 

 method showed no more than differential 

 sensitivity and explicitly denied that 

 sensitivity to wave length as thus induced 

 in an insect or other animal meant sensa- 

 tions possessing the characteristic human 

 quality. That is, we cannot argue that 

 an object that appears red to a normal 

 human being likewise appears red to the 

 sensitive animal. 



In his later volume (167) Lubbock made 

 the first serious attempt to cover the field 

 of comparative psychology without re- 

 course to the prevailing anecdotal litera- 

 ture. He drew his facts mainly from the 

 anatomists and physiologists, and with 

 due caution from the naturalists — the very 

 sources indeed that the anecdotalists in 

 general ignored. The first ten chapters 

 deal with the sensory capacities of 

 animals, including man, the three follow- 

 ing chapters are devoted to his favorite 

 topic — the instincts and intelligence of 

 insects, while the final chapter on the dog 

 includes mainly a report of his experiments 

 on his own dog, Van. That he preferred 

 to leave the treatment of the higher 

 animals thus incomplete rather than 

 resort to anecdotal evidence indicates the 

 depth of his devotion to scientific fact. 

 In introducing laboratory methods into 



