William Preyer and the Prenatal Development of Behavior

WILLIAM PREYER AND THE PRENA TAL DEVELOPMENT OF BEHAVIOR LEONARD CARMICHAEL* The most treasured book in my scientific library has this title page. SPECIELLE PHYSIOLOGIE DES EMBRYO. UNTERSUCHUNGEN UEBER DIE LEBENSERSCHEINUNGEN VOR DER GEBURT W. PREYER, PROFESSOR DEH PHYSIOLOGIE AN DER UNIVERSITÄT JENA. MIT 9 LITHOORAPHIETEN TAFELS USD HOLZSCHNITTEN IM TEXT. -Prof. pR. ^oux LEIPZIG,b^ü.slaU. TH. GRIEBEN'S VERLAG (L. FERNAU). 1885. * Vice-President for Research and Exploration, National Geographie Society, Washington , D.C. 20036. As can be seen, the value of my personal copy of Preyer's work is enhanced by the fact that it was formerly owned by Dr. Wilhelm Roux (1850-1924), director of the Institute of Embryology and Developmental Mechanics at Breslau and founder of the study of Entwicklungsmechanik [I]. I can remember as if it were this week the day almost half a century ago as I casually took down a copy of this rather rare book from a shelf in the Harvard University library. I was a little curious, and I intended merely to leaf through it, as I had never seen it before and none of my graduate school teachers had referred to it. Then suddenly I had an almost electric experience of insight. I saw that its pages dealt with an effective experimental approach to the problem that was then, and still is, my basic scientific interest. In briefest terms, this problem asks about the nature of the onset and the development of behavior—and especially of receptor-released behavior —both before and after the hatching, or the birth, of the individual. I had already decided before I saw this book that this study, which may be called the embryology of behavior, is best understood when the early responses of lower vertebrates, birds, man, and other mammals are carefully compared. The results of a study of this sort, I believe, are basic in understanding the development of the fixed motor patterns that are now, especially in the work of ethologists, recognized as the building blocks of all adaptive behavior. The study of early human maturation also bears on an explanation of the vexatious and often misunderstood nature of "instinct" and on all that the Germans call psychische Entwicklung, or the growth of the mind in any organism including man. William Preyer, the author of this still far too little known book [2], was a physiologist who was born in London in 1842 and died in 1897 in Wiesbaden. In many ways I feel an especial kinship with him. For years, as has been true in my own case, his research led him to consider some related, and in certain respects inseparable, problems of zoology, embryology, and psychology. Preyer was a student of Claude Bernard in Paris and of other physiologists at Bonn, Berlin , and Vienna. His own teaching and research were done at Bonn, Jena, and later at Berlin. He is probably best known in America for his book Die Seele des Kindes [3]. This work on child development did much to start modern scientific child psychology and was translated from German into English and published as The Mind of the Child. Preyer also did research and wrote technically on hearing and 412 I Leonard Carmichael · William Preyer the other senses. His later book on mental development was also influential [4]. His 1885 book that so opened my eyes to a rational research approach to the understanding of the development of behavior deals with the author's own experiments on living vertebrates, and especially on mammalian embryos and fetuses. In this volume he also presents a critical and very valuable summary of much previous research on embryonic and fetal behavior. This amazing review deals with the work of over 400 scientists and cites 552 titles in full in its bibliography. Under the direction of my good friend, the late Dr. George E. Coghill, some of the chapters of Preyer's book that deal with the sensitivity and the motility of the embryo were translated into English and published in 1937 [5]. I believe that the idea of this translation arose in conversations and correspondence that I had with Coghill. I am very confident that Coghill did not know of...