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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLII 



behavior has shown a curious parallelism in each of its three 

 great divisions. In each division the slate was. as it were, wiped 

 clean some ten or fifteen years ago; the existing structure was 

 razed to the ground, and we have been building it up again 

 ever since. In the lower organisms Loeb reduced the phe- 

 nomena to almost inorganic simplicity. For the ants, bees and 

 other higher invertebrates Bethe took similar action ; they were 

 stripped of their fanciful decorations of memory, intelligence, 

 etc., and left absolutely devoid of "psychic qualities" of any 

 sort; their behavior was composed of invariable reflexes and 

 tropisms of the simplest character. Thorndike performed the 

 same operation for the vertebrates. Not only did they not 

 reason (preposterous notion!), but they did not imitate, could 

 not learn by seeing a thing done nor by being put through 

 an act, nor by any other way than by simply gradually drop- 

 ping out useless movements from among those made at random ; 

 and they had not even ideas of things past, to say nothing of 

 perceiving relations or being capable of trains of thought or 

 of formulating a plan. 



In all three divisions of the subject the work since these 

 operations has consisted largely in the slow and painful restora- 

 tion, by precise experimental methods, of what was thus wiped 

 out at one fell swoop. The throe authors named, with those 

 that aided them, perhaps did the science of behavior the greatest 

 possible service at that time. Before them there was hardly an 

 ordered science in this subject; there was a jungle of supposi- 

 tions, assumptions and anecdotes. Loeb, Bethe, Thorndike and 

 Company destroyed all this and compelled us to rebuild from 

 the ground up, a solid structure, based on precise scientific 

 methods. How high the structure will have to go, no one 

 can foretell; certainly it is not yet finished. Indeed, animal 

 behavior as a science is merely in its swaddling clothes; it can 

 not carry as yet many sweeping eonelusions, particularly nega- 

 tive ones. General negations based on what we now know are 

 most unscientific; they are largely eapitali/ations of our large 

 stock of ignorance. It behooves the man of science, therefore, 

 to be careful in his destructive criticisms; some recent contro- 

 versies show that this caution is much needed. It will be long 

 before our science is coextensive with the phenomena with which 

 it is attempting to deal. H. S. Jennings. 



(No. 494 was issued on April 10, 1908.) 



