Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T19:36:08.215Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The problem of raccoon intelligence in behaviourist America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2009

MICHAEL PETTIT
MICHAEL PETTIT
Affiliation:
History & Theory of Psychology/Science and Technology Studies, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M3J 1P3. Email: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Even during its heyday, American behaviourist psychology was repeatedly criticized for the lack of diversity in its experimental subjects, with its almost exclusive focus on rats and pigeons. This paper revisits this debate by examining the rise and fall of a once promising alternative laboratory animal and model of intelligence, the raccoon. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, psychological investigations of the raccoon existed on the borderlands between laboratory experimentation, natural history and pet-keeping. Moreover, its chief advocate, Lawrence W. Cole, inhabited the institutional and geographic borderlands of the discipline. This liminality ultimately worked against the raccoon's selection as a standardized model during the behaviourist era. The question of raccoon intelligence was also a prominent topic in the contemporaneous debates over the place of sentiment in popular nature writing. Although Cole and others argued that the raccoon provided unique opportunities to study mental attributes such as curiosity and attention, others accused the animal's advocates of sentimentalism, anthropomorphism and nature faking. The paper examines the making and unmaking of this hybrid scientific culture as the lives of experimenters and animals became entangled.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 391 - 421
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Sterling, Bruce, ‘Our neural Chernobyl’, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1988) 74Google Scholar, pp. 131–138.

2 Beach, Frank A., ‘The Snark was a Boojum’, American Psychologist (1950) 5, pp. 115–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Breland, Keller and Breland, Marian, ‘A field of applied animal psychology’, American Psychologist (1951) 6, pp. 202–204.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed On their career in applied operant conditioning see Bailey, Robert E. and Arthur Gillaspy, J. Jr. ‘Operant psychology goes to the fair: Marian and Keller Breland in the popular press, 1947–1966’, Behavior Analyst (2005), 28, pp. 143–159CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

4 Breland, Keller and Breland, Marian, ‘The misbehavior of organisms’, American Psychologist (1961) 16, pp. 681–684CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 682.

5 Adele E. Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura (eds.), The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992; Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997; Karen A. Rader, Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900–1955, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002; Angela A.H. Creager, The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930–1965, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002; Jim Endersby, A Guinea Pig's History of Biology, London: Heinemann, 2007.

6 See Clause, Barbara T., ‘The Wistar rat as a right choice: establishing mammalian standards and the ideal of a standardized mammal’, Journal of the History of Biology (1993) 26, pp. 329–349CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Frederick Wertz, J., ‘Of rats and psychologists: a study of the history and meaning of science’, Theory & Psychology (1994), 4, pp. 165–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cheryl Logan, A., ‘The altered rationale behind the choice of a standard animal in psychological research: Henry H. Donaldson, Adolf Meyer and “the albino rat”’, History of Psychology (1999), 2, pp. 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cheryl Logan, A., ‘“[A]re Norway rats … things?” Diversity versus generality in the use of albino rats in experiments on development and sexuality’, Journal of the History of Biology (2001), 34, pp. 287–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See especially Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. See also Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987; Eileen Crist, Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999; Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999; Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (eds.), Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

8 See Lynch, Michael, ‘Sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences’, Social Studies of Science (1988) 18, pp. 265–289CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 138–158; Kirk, Robert G.W., ‘“Wanted – standard guinea pigs”: standardisation and the experimental animal market in Britain ca. 1919–1947’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2008), 39, pp. 280–291CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

9 Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov's Physiological Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

10 See Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New York and London: Routledge, 1989; Shirley Carol Strum and Linda Marie Fedigan (eds.), Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; Montgomery, Georgina M., ‘Place, practice and primatology: Clarence Ray Carpenter, primate communication and the development of field methodology, 1931–1945’, Journal of the History of Biology (2005) 38, pp. 495–533CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Munz, Tania, ‘The bee battles: Karl von Frisch, Adrian Wenner, and the honey bee dance language controversy’, Journal of the History of Biology (2005), 38, pp. 535–570CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005; Rees, Amanda, ‘Reflections on the field – primatology, popular science and the politics of personhood’, Social Studies of Science (2007), 37, pp. 881–907CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab–Field Border in Biology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 5.

12 See Bakan, David, ‘Behaviorism and American urbanization’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (1966) 2, pp. 5–28.3.0.CO;2-8>CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 On the blurry boundaries between science, leisure and domesticity see Philip J. Pauly, ‘Summer resort and scientific discipline: Woods Hole and the structure of American biology, 1882–1925’, in Ronald Rainger, Keith R. Benson and Jane Maienschein (eds.), The American Development of Biology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, pp. 121–150.

14 On the history of behaviorism see Burnham, John C., ‘On the origins of behaviorism’, Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences (1968), 4, 143–151Google Scholar; Robert A. Boakes, From Darwin to Behaviourism: Psychology and the Minds of Animals, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984; John M. O'Donnell, The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology, 1870–1920, New York: New York University Press, 1985; Laurence D. Smith, Behaviorism and Logical Positivism: A Reassessment of the Alliance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986; Kerry W. Buckley, Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism, New York: Guilford Press, 1989; Laurence D. Smith and William R. Woodward (eds.), B.F. Skinner and Behaviorism in American Culture, Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1996; John A. Mills, Control: History of Behavioral Psychology, New York: New York University Press, 1998; Nadine Weidman, Constructing Scientific Psychology: Karl Lashley's Mind–Brain Debates, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Rebecca M. Lemov, World as Laboratory, New York: Hill and Wang, 2005; Alexandra Rutherford, Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinner's Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life, 1950s–1970s, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

15 Schloegel, Judy Johns and Schmidgen, Henning, ‘General physiology, experimental psychology, and evolutionism: unicellular organisms as objects of psychophysiological research, 1877–1918’, Isis (2002), 93, pp. 614–645CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 On the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ that renewed interest in consciousness, thinking and the mind see Leahey, Thomas H., ‘The mythical revolutions of American psychology’, American Psychologist (1992) 47, 308–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996; Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005; Cohen-Cole, Jamie, ‘Instituting the science of mind: intellectual economies and disciplinary exchange at Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies’, BJHS (2007), 40, pp. 567–597CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Collins, Alan, ‘From H=log sn to conceptual framework: a history of information’, History of Psychology (2007), 10, pp. 44–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Samuel I. Zeveloff, Raccoons: A Natural History, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002, pp. 165–176.

18 Polly Redford, Raccoons & Eagles: Two Views of American Wildlife, New York: Dutton, 1965, pp. 25–31; Zeveloff, op. cit. (17), 4–6; Nicholls, Henry, ‘The royal raccoon from Swedesboro’, Nature (2007) 446, pp. 255–256.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

19 Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, New York: Vintage, 1974, pp. 546–567.

20 Mencken, H.L., ‘Designation for colored folk’, American Speech (1944), 19, pp. 161–174CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London: Verso, 1999, pp. 98–100.

21 Dawn Elaine Bastian and Judy K. Mitchell, Handbook of Native American Mythology, Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2004, pp. 154–155.

22 Halsey Thrasher, The Hunter and Trapper, New York: Judd, 1868, p. 45.

23 Merriam, Clinton Hart, ‘The vertebrates of the Adirondack region, northeastern New York’, Transactions of the Linnaean Society of New York (1882) 1, pp. 1–168Google Scholar, p. 93.

24 William T. Hornaday, The American Natural History, New York: George Newnes, 1904, p. 41.

25 Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

26 See ‘A raccoon in the lockup’, Los Angeles Times, 22 October 1899, p. 13; ‘This raccoon took a Sunday off’, New York Times, 11 February 1901, p. 1; ‘Burglar was pet coon’, New York Times, 3 June 1905, p. 9; ‘Coon in role of robber’, Washington Post, 11 February 1907, p. 5; ‘Police on a coon hunt’, New York Times, 9August 1908, p. 7; ‘A coon hunt over the roofs of Washington’, Washington Post, 6 September 1908, p. 8; ‘Coon on high Portland building’, Boston Daily Globe, 20 October 1908; ‘Coon chase in New York’, Washington Post, 23 October 1908, p. 6.

27 ‘Smart raccoons: are trained to clean chimneys and owner is getting rich’, Washington Post, 13 October 1906, p. 6.

28 ‘Coolidge gets a raccoon’, New York Times, 27 November 1926, p. 4; ‘Coolidge “Coon” gets ribbon and is now named Rebecca’, New York Times, 25 December 1926, p. 2; ‘Coolidge pets could make zoo of their own’, New York Times, 28 August 1927, p. 2.

29 ‘Coons and green corn: how Connecticut farmers get even with the poultry thief’, New York Times, 27 August 1884, p. 3.

30 ‘Hunting the raccoon’, Washington Post, 28 November 1897, p. 26; ‘Sport of coon hunting’, Chicago Tribune, 11 November 1900, p. 20.

31 J.E. Williams, Night Hunting, Jackson: McCowat-Mercer, 1911, pp. 22–23.

32 ‘Coon hunting and the S.P.C.A.’, New York Times, 26 March 1905, p. 8.

33 ‘Coons and coon-hunting: a New-Hampshire expert describes the animal and the sport’, New York Times, 13 April 1884, p. 5.

34 On the encounter with extinction in nineteenth-century America see Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, New York: Basic Books, 1999, pp. 1–57; Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

35 Cole, L.W., ‘Concerning the intelligence of raccoons’, Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology (1907) 17, pp. 211–261CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, H.B., ‘The raccoon: a study in animal intelligence’, American Journal of Psychology (1907), 18, pp. 447–489CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 On pre-Darwinian comparative psychology see Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 20–70. On the early modern denial of animal psychology see Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.

37 Spalding, Douglas A., ‘On instinct’, Nature (1872) 6, pp. 485–486Google Scholar; idem, ‘Instinct: with original observations on young animals’, Macmillan's Magazine (1873), 27, pp. 282–293. See Philip Gray, Howard, ‘Spalding and his influence on research in developmental behavior’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (1967), 3, pp. 168–1793.0.CO;2-Y>CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 As Roger K. Thomas has pointed out, the ideal of parsimony was not Morgan's true intention, although it was a telling misreading that predominated in debates among comparative psychologists. See Thomas, Roger K., ‘Recurring errors among recent history of psychology textbooks’, American Journal of Psychology (2007), 120, pp. 477–495Google ScholarPubMed, pp. 483–487.

39 Boakes, op. cit. (14), pp. 2–52. On the Victorian debates over animal language see Valone, David A., ‘Language, race, and history: the origin of the Whitney–Müller debate and the transformation of the human sciences’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (1996) 32, pp. 119–1343.0.CO;2-R>CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Radick, Greg, ‘Morgan's canon, Garner's phonograph, and the evolutionary origins of language and reason’, BJHS (2000), 33, pp. 3–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

40 On the relationship between animal psychology and physiology see Schloegel and Schmidgen, op. cit. (15); Paul S. White, ‘The experimental animal in Victorian Britain’, in Daston and Mitman, op. cit. (7), pp. 59–81.

41 E.L. Thorndike, ‘Animal intelligence: an experimental study of the associative processes in animals’, Psychological Monographs (1898) 2.

42 Stam, Henderikus J. and Kalmanovitch, Tanya, ‘E.L. Thorndike and the origins of animal psychology: on the nature of the animal in psychology’, American Psychologist (1998) 53, pp. 1135–1144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 See Mills, Wesley, ‘The nature of animal intelligence and the methods of investigating it’, Psychological Review (1899), 3, pp. 262–274CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 266.

44 Thorndike, E.L., ‘The mental life of the monkeys’, Psychological Monographs (1901), 3Google Scholar; Kinnaman, A.J., ‘Mental life of two Macacus Rhesus monkeys in captivity’, American Journal of Psychology (1902), 13, pp. 98–148CrossRefGoogle Scholar and pp. 173–218.

45 Small, Willard S., ‘An experimental study of the mental processes of the white rat. II’, American Journal of Psychology (1901), 12, pp. 206–239CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John B. Watson, ‘Animal education: an experimental study on the psychical development of the white rat, correlated with the growth of its nervous system’, Ph.D dissertation, University of Chicago, 1903. It should be noted that Small emphasized the existence of what he called a ‘psycho-biological character’ specific to each species.

46 Samelson, Franz, ‘Struggle for scientific authority: the reception of Watson's behaviorism, 1913–1920’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (1981) 17, pp. 399–425.3.0.CO;2-2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 170–171.

48 Schaffer, Simon, ‘Babbage's intelligence: calculating engines and the factory system’, Critical Inquiry (1994), 21, pp. 203–227CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Davis, op. cit. (35), p. 448.

50 Lawrence Cole to Robert M. Yerkes, 10 April 1906, Robert M. Yerkes Papers, Yale University Library, Box 11, Folder 186.

51 Davis, op. cit. (35), p. 452.

52 Davis, op. cit. (35), p. 465.

53 Davis, op. cit. (35), p. 468.

54 Davis, op. cit. (35), pp. 452–453.

55 Karl Groos, The Play of Animals (tr. Elizabeth L. Baldwin), New York: Appleton, 1898, p. 214. Baldwin edited this volume and wrote a preface highlighting the book's affinities with his own theory of organic selection.

56 Hall, G. Stanley and Smith, Theodora L., ‘Curiosity and interest’, Pedagogy Seminary (1903), 10, pp. 315–358CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 353. On the psychology of attention see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Attention, New York: Zone Books, 1999; Sven Lüders, ‘The “fluctuations of attention” between physiology, experimental psychology and psycho-technical application’, in Mitchell Ash and Thomas Sturm (eds.), Psychology's Territories: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives from Different Disciplines, Mahwah, NJ, 2007, pp. 31–50.

57 Even Groos conceded that his fellow German naturalists held that the raccoon was ‘curious to the last degree’. See Groos, op. cit. (55), p. 217.

58 Davis, op. cit. (35), p. 486.

59 Cole, L.W., ‘Observation of the senses and instincts of the raccoon’, Journal of Animal Behavior (1912) 2, pp. 299–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 308.

60 Cole, op. cit. (59), p. 300.

61 Cole, op. cit. (35), p. 237.

62 Cole to Yerkes, 10 December 1905, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 186.

63 Cole, op. cit. (35), p. 242.

64 Cole, op. cit. (35), pp. 232–234.

65 Shepherd, W.T., ‘Imitation in raccoons’, American Journal of Psychology (1911), 22, pp. 583–585CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Davis's inability to elicit imitative behaviour see Davis, op. cit. (35), pp. 482–485.

66 Jennings, H.S., ‘Recent work on the behavior of higher animals’, American Naturalist (1908), 42, pp. 207–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 213.

67 Yerkes, R.M., ‘Recent progress and present tendencies in comparative psychology’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology (1908), 2, pp. 271–279CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 277.

68 For Yerkes's work on animal ideational behaviour, see Trewin, Shae E., ‘Robert Yerkes’ multiple-choice apparatus, 1913–1939', American Journal of Psychology (2007) 120, pp. 645–660.Google ScholarPubMed

69 Roosevelt, Theodore, ‘Nature fakers', Everybody's Magazine (1907) 17, pp. 427–430Google Scholar. On Barnum's connection to nineteenth-century natural history see Pettit, Michael, ‘“The joy in believing”: the Cardiff Giant, commercial deceptions, and styles of observation in Gilded Age America’, Isis (2006), 97, pp. 659–677CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

70 Burroughs, John, ‘Real and sham natural history’, Atlantic Monthly (March 1903) 91, pp. 298–309Google Scholar.

71 The definitive account of this chapter in American natural history is Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, and Sentiment, Golden, Co: Fulcrum Press, 1990.

72 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, pp. 141–160; Cronon, William, ‘The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong Nature’, Environmental History (1996), 1, pp. 7–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, pp. 13–16.

73 Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory, ‘Nature, not books: scientists and the origins of the Nature–Study Movement in the 1890s’, Isis (2005), 96, pp. 324–352CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 On the growth of animal biographies see Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 442–449. On the evolutionary epic see James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

75 For biographical information on Long see Lutts, op. cit. (71), pp. 55–60; Mitman, op. cit. (7), pp. 10–12; David Mazel, A Century of Early Ecocriticism, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001, pp. 113–114.

76 William J. Long, School of the Woods, Boston: Ginn and Co., 1902.

77 William J. Long, A Little Brother to the Bear and other Animal Studies, Boston: Ginn and Co., 1903, pp. 217–238.

78 On the theological underpinnings of Long's natural history see Lutts, op. cit. (71), pp. 157–158.

79 John Burroughs, ‘Machines in fur and feathers’, The Independent, 12 March 1908, pp. 570–574, p. 571.

80 ‘John Burroughs supports the president’, New York Times Sunday Magazine, 9 June 1907, p. 2.

81 Long, William J., ‘The modern school of nature-study and its critics’, North American Review (May 1903) 176, pp. 688–698Google Scholar; idem, ‘Science, nature, and criticism’, Science, 13 May 1904, 19, pp. 760–767.

82 Long, op. cit. (76), p. 9.

83 ‘“I propose to smoke Roosevelt out” – Dr Long’, New York Times Sunday Magazine, 2 June 1907, p. 2. On the naturalist's shift from the gun to the camera see Mitman, op. cit. (7), pp. 5–25.

84 ‘Animals disprove both Burroughs and Long’, New York Sunday Times Magazine, 16 June 1907, p. 2.

85 See Dallas Lore Sharp, Roof and Meadow, New York: Century, 1904; Charles C.D. Roberts, The Watchers of the Trails: A Book of Animal Life, New York: A. Wessels Co., 1906.

86 Roberts, op. cit. (85), p. 223; Long, op. cit. (76), p. 34.

87 Long, op. cit. (76), p. 226.

88 H.B. Davis, Review of ‘Concerning the intelligence of raccoons.’ By L.W. Cole, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 7 May 1908, 5, pp. 278–279.

89 Long, op. cit. (76), p. 40.

90 Burroughs, John, ‘Untaught wisdom’, Outlook, 2 May 1908, 89, pp. 34–37Google Scholar, p. 37.

91 Cole to Yerkes, 14 February 1907, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 186.

92 ‘A study of “coons”’, New York Daily Tribune, 5 August 1906, p. 2; ‘A study of “coons”, Forest and Stream, 12 October 1907, 69, p. 573; ‘Raccoon brains’, San Francisco Call – Junior Section, 6 March 1909, p. 1.

93 Shepherd, W.T., ‘The discrimination of articulate sounds by raccoons’, American Journal of Psychology (1911) 22, pp. 116–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

94 Photograph, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 186.

95 On corporeal violence such as whipping and beating during the experiments see Cole, op. cit. (35), p. 250; and Davis, op. cit. (35), p. 461.

96 For the antivivisectionist criticisms of Watson see Dewsbury, Donald A., ‘Early interactions between animal psychologists and animal activists and the founding of the APA Committee on Precautions in Animal Experimentation’, American Psychologist (1990), 45, pp. 315–327CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, pp. 320–322.

97 Hornaday, William T., ‘The psychology of wild animals’, McClure's Magazine (February 1908) 30, p. 469Google Scholar.

98 Witmer, Lightner, ‘A monkey with a mind’, Psychological Clinic (1909) 3, pp. 179–209.Google ScholarPubMed For more on Peter and the reception of this research see Douglas Keither Candland, Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 196–207; Dewsbury, Donald A., ‘Samuel Fernberger's rejected doctoral dissertation: a neglected resource for the history of ape research in America’, History of Psychology (2009), 12, pp. 1–6CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

99 Cole, op. cit. (35), pp. 211–212; Davis, op. cit. (35), p. 462.

100 Robert M. Yerkes, The Dancing Mouse: A Study of Animal Behavior, New York: Macmillan Co., 1907, p. vii.

101 See Heyn, Edward T., ‘Hans, the wonderful horse of Berlin’, McClure's Magazine (May 1905) 25, pp. 84–92Google Scholar; Jastrow, Joseph, ‘Fact and fable in animal psychology’, Popular Science Monthly (1906), 69, pp. 138–146Google Scholar. On Jastrow's career-long concern with deception and debunking see Pettit, Michael, ‘Joseph Jastrow, the psychology of deception, and the racial economy of observation’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (2007), 43, pp. 159–175CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

102 J.B.W., Review of Oskar Pfungst, Das Pferd des Herrn von Osten (Der kluge Hans), Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology (1908) 3, pp. 329–331, p. 331.

103 See ‘The animal mind under scrutiny’, New York Times, 21 March 1908, p. 153.

104 Brewster, E.T., ‘The animal mind from the inside’, McClure's Magazine (June 1909) 33, pp. 150–157Google Scholar, p. 152.

105 Brewster, op. cit. (104), p. 150.

106 Brewster, E.T., ‘Studying the animal mind in laboratories’, McClure's Magazine (August 1909) 33, pp. 383–387Google Scholar, p. 387.

107 Cole, op. cit. (35), p. 217.

108 Watson, John B., ‘Psychology as the behaviorist views it’, Psychological Review (1913), 20, pp. 158–177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109 On American functionalism see Greenwood, John D., ‘Mechanism, purpose and progress: Darwin and early American psychology’, History of the Human Sciences (2008) 21, pp. 103–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

110 On the early twentieth-century geography of animal psychology see Jennings, op. cit. (66), pp. 207–208.

111 Hunter, Walter S., ‘The delayed reaction in animals and children’, Behavior Monographs (1913), 2, pp. 1–86Google Scholar, p. 1.

112 Walter S. Hunter, ‘Walter S. Hunter’, in Edwin G. Boring (ed.), History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 4, Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1952, pp. 163–187, p. 166.

113 Hunter, op. cit. (111), pp. 21–22.

114 Hunter, op. cit. (111), pp. iii, 85–86.

115 Hunter, op. cit. (111), pp. 46–47.

116 Hunter op. cit. (111), p. 71.

117 Hunter, op. cit. (111), p. 69.

118 Hunter, op. cit. (111), pp. 75–78; Hunter, Walter S., ‘A reply to Professor Cole’, Journal of Animal Behavior (1915), 5, p. 406CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, General Psychology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923, p. 38. ‘Structuralist’ psychologists, namely Cornell University's E.B. Titchener, had argued that consciousness consisted of three ‘elements’: sensations, feelings and images. In contrast, in the early twentieth century, Oswald Külpe's ‘Würzburg school’ proposed the addition of a fourth category, imageless thoughts. The resulting controversy was a major intellectual impetus for the rise of Watsonian behaviourism. On the debate concerning imageless thought see Coon, Deborah J., ‘Standardizing the subject: experimental psychologists, introspection, and the quest for a technoscientific ideal’, Technology and Culture (1993), 34, pp. 757–783.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

119 Hunter, op. cit. (111), p. 15.

120 Cole, op. cit. (35), pp. 226–232; Cole, L.W. and Long, F.M., ‘Visual discrimination in raccoons’, Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology (1909), 19, pp. 657–683CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121 Gregg, F.M. and McPheeters, C.A., ‘Behavior of raccoons to a temporal series of stimuli’, Journal of Animal Behavior (1913), 3, pp. 241–259CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

122 Cole to Yerkes, 15 August 1914, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 188.

123 Cole, L.W., ‘The Chicago experiments with raccoons’, Journal of Animal Behavior (1915), 5, pp. 158–173CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 159, original emphasis.

124 Cole, op. cit. (123), pp. 161–162.

125 Cole to Yerkes, 14 September 1914, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 188.

126 Hunter, op. cit. (111), p. 86.

127 Davis, op. cit. (35), p. 485.

128 Cole to Yerkes, 10 April 1906, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 186.

129 Cole to Yerkes, 14 February 1907, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 186.

130 Shepherd, op. cit. (93), p. 119.

131 Yerkes, op. cit. (100), p. vii.

132 John B. Watson, Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, New York: Holt, 1914, p. 227. For example, see the charges of fraud that accompanied R.L. Garner's claims about a simian tongue during the 1890s; see Radick, ‘Morgan's canon’, op. cit. (39), pp. 19–20.

133 Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology, New York: Liveright, 1929, pp. 276–280.

134 On the production of ignorance in science see Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (eds.), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

135 Berlyne, D.E., ‘Novelty and curiosity as determinants of exploratory behaviour’, British Journal of Psychology (1950) 41, pp. 68–80Google Scholar; idem, Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960.

136 Watson, John B., ‘Kinaesthetic and organic sensations: their role in the reactions of the white rat to the maze’, Psychological Monographs (1907), 8, pp. 1–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John B. Watson and Harvey Carr, A., ‘Orientation of the white rat’, Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology (1908), 18, pp. 27–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

137 For the precedent of Cole and Davis see Welker, W.I. and Seidenstein, S., ‘Somatic sensory representation in the cerebral cortex of the raccoon (Procyon Lotor)’, Journal of Comparative Neurology (1959), 111, pp. 469–501CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 470. See also Welker, W.I. and Seidenstein, S., ‘External morphology of the cerebral cortex of the raccoon (Procyon-Lotor) in relationship to development of sensory receiving areas’, Anatomical Record (1958), 130, pp. 387–388Google Scholar; Pubols, B.H. Jr.Welker, W.I. and Johnson, J.I. Jr. ‘Somatic sensory representation of forelimb in dorsal root fibers of raccoon, coatimundi, and cat’, Journal of Neurophysiology (1965) 28, pp. 312–341CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, J.I. Jr.Welker, W.I. and Pubols, B.H. Jr. ‘Somatotopic organization of raccoon dorsal column nuclei’, Journal of Comparative Neurology (1968) 132, pp. 1–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

138 O'Donnell, op. cit. (14), pp. 200–207.

139 See Todd, James T. and Morris, Edward K., ‘The early research of John B. Watson: before the behavioral revolution’, Behavior Analyst (1986) 9, pp. 71–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

140 Dewsbury, Donald A., ‘Triumph and tribulation in the history of American comparative psychology’, Journal of Comparative Psychology (1992), 106, pp. 3–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

141 L.N. Wilson, Clark University Directory of Alumni, Faculty and Students, Worchester, MA: Clark University Press, 1915, p. 17.

142 Cole to Yerkes, 15 May 1908, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 187.

143 Chiszar, David and Wertheimer, Michael, ‘The Boulder model: a history of psychology at the University of Colorado’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (1988), 24, pp. 81–863.0.CO;2-M>CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

144 Yerkes to Cole, 10 October 1912, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 188.

145 Hunter to Yerkes, 16 November 1950, Yerkes Papers, Box 27, Folder 491.

146 Hunter, op. cit. (112), p. 172.

147 See Hunter, Walter S., ‘The behavior of raccoons in a double alternation temporal maze’, Journal of Genetic Psychology (1928), 35, pp. 374–388Google Scholar; Norman Munn, L., ‘Pattern and brightness discrimination in raccoons’, Journal of Genetic Psychology (1930), 37, pp. 3–34Google Scholar.

148 Cole to Yerkes, 14 March 1934, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 189.

149 See Weidman, op. cit. (14), pp. 160–186.

150 Hunter, Walter S. and Sommermeier, E., ‘The relation of degree of Indian blood to score on the Otis Intelligence Test’, Journal of Comparative Psychology (1922), 2, pp. 257–277CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

151 See Thomas, Marion, ‘Yerkes, Hamilton and the experimental study of the ape mind: from evolutionary psychiatry to eugenics politics’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2006), 37, pp. 273–294CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

152 Yerkes to Josephine Ball, 20 November 1925, Yerkes Papers, Box 4, Folder 55.

153 Ball to Yerkes, 24 February 1930, Yerkes Papers, Box 4, Folder 55.

154 Yerkes to Ball, 13 March 1930, Yerkes Papers, Box 4, Folder 55.

155 Ball to Yerkes, 1 March 1926, Yerkes Papers, Box 4, Folder 55.

156 On Beach's early experience with rats see Frank A. Beach, ‘Frank A. Beach’, in Gardner Lindzey (ed.), A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 6, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974, pp. 33–58, p. 35. As a graduate student, Karl Lashley's decidedly non-behaviourist perspective had a tremendous influence on Beach's intellectual pursuits. See Dewsbury, Donald A., ‘The Chicago Five: a family of integrative psychobiologists’, History of Psychology (2002), 5, pp. 16–37CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

157 On the study of animal behaviour at the American Museum of Natural History see Mitman, Gregg, ‘Cinematic nature: Hollywood technology, popular culture, and the American Museum of Natural History’, Isis (1993) 84, pp. 637–661.Google Scholar

158 Whitney, Leon F., ‘The raccoon: some mental attributes’, Journal of Mammalogy (1933), 14, pp. 108–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 112. See also idem, ‘The raccoon and its hunting’, Journal of Mammalogy (1931) 12, pp. 29–38.

159 Leon F. Whitney and Acil B. Underwood, The Raccoon, Orange, CT: Practical Science Publishing Co., 1952, p. 127, p. 137.

160 Yerkes to Cole, 5 March 1934, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 189.