Bird Display

Abstract

THE somewhat supercilious attitude of the laboratory zoologist to the study of birds, if less prevalent than formerly, is not entirely a thing of the past. The notion that to study a dead bird in a laboratory is a permissible occupation for a serious zoologist (though to study some more deserving kind of animal such as a protozoon or an echinoderm would be better), but that to study living birds in the field is mere dilettantism unworthy of a real man of science, dies hard. This kind of attitude is, in fact, only a particular example of the gulf between the laboratory and museum zoologist and the field worker which is happily being more and more effectively bridged at the present time. So far as the study of birds is concerned, the ornithologists themselves, or some of them, have afforded a certain excuse for the old sneer, but the work under review provides a very good illustration of the contribution which modern field ornithology is making to general biology.

Bird Display

An Introduction to the Study of Bird Psychology. By Edward A. Armstrong. Pp. xvi+381+22 plates. (Cambridge : At the University Press, 1942.) 21s. net.