Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/317

Rh Physical Laboratory, erected and equipped by Mr. S. S. Palmer, and endowed with $200,000 by Mr. D. B. Jones and Mr. T. D. Jones, is admirably adapted for work in physics and electrical engineering. The three floors have an area of approximately two acres for the work of instruction and research, and every need in the way of appliances and apparatus is provided.

Guyot Hall, completed last year at a cost of $425,000, is divided about equally between biology and geology, giving the latter science probably the best provision in the country. The building contains over a hundred rooms, including a large museum. Biology has in addition a separate building as a vivarium for the study of living plants and animals. The aquaria have both sea and fresh water, and there is provision for insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Near by is a pond and stream where animals may be kept under natural conditions.

Princeton offers opportunities for study and research in the natural and exact sciences which are in some ways unique. The situation in the country, but within easy reach of New York and Philadelphia, offers many advantages. With its peculiar attractions, Princeton takes its place with the great universities so closely lining the eastern seaboard—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Pennsylvania and the Johns Hopkins.

last number of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie devotes twenty-two pages to a review of the recent literature of comparative psychology. This review covers more or less adequately the material for the years 1907, 1908 and 1909. Twenty-eight articles are noted of which nineteen are by American authors, one by an Englishman and the remaining eight by Germans.

This review emphasizes the fact that comparative psychology is largely an American branch of science. It began, in so far as the study of higher animal forms in this country is concerned, in 1898, with the classical work of Thorndike on "Animal Intelligence," which was followed three years later by his study of the "Mental Life of the Monkeys." Shortly afterwards small comparative laboratories were added to the already existing experimental laboratories of Clark, Harvard and Chicago, and in these the great bulk of the animal work has since been done. Recently a fairly adequate animal-behavior laboratory has been added to the psychological department of the Johns Hopkins University. It has been an interesting fact in the development of this field that the work has not been confined wholly to specially developed technical laboratories. Several important pieces of work have appeared under psychological auspices from the universities of Cornell, Illinois and Stanford and from the zoological laboratories of the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and of the Carnegie Institution.

The work in this country has been characterized by systematic and long-continued studies of certain groups of problems; while that in foreign countries has been more sporadic. The work of Pfangst on "Der kluge Hans," which has been translated by Mr. Carl Rahn and that of Katz and Révész on the light sense of the chick are the two conspicuous examples of systematic and careful work in Germany. In the United States work has been centered around three problems: (1) the general method of learning (problem boxes, mazes, etc.) which gives acquaintance with the animal's instinctive capacities and prepares the way for a study of (2) imitation (and the effect of tuition) and (3) the determination of the delicacy and completeness of its sense-organ equipment.

The first problem received the greatest amount of attention during the first