Читать книгу Animal Behaviour - C. Lloyd Morgan - Страница 6

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We commonly use the word “behaviour” with a wide range of meaning. We speak of the behaviour of troops in the field, of the prisoner at the bar, of a dandy in the ball-room. But the chemist and the physicist often speak of the behaviour of atoms and molecules, or that of a gas under changing conditions of temperature and pressure. The geologist tells us that a glacier behaves in many respects like a river, and discusses how the crust of the earth behaves under the stresses to which it is subjected. Weather-wise people comment on the behaviour of the mercury in a barometer as a storm approaches. Instances of a similar usage need not be multiplied. Frequently employed with a moral significance, the word is at least occasionally used in a wider and more comprehensive sense. When Mary, the nurse, returns with the little Miss Smiths from Master Brown’s birthday party, she is narrowly questioned as to their behaviour; but meanwhile their father, the professor, has been discoursing to his students on the behaviour of iron filings in the magnetic field; and his son Jack, of H.M.S. Blunderer, entertains his elder sisters with a graphic description of the behaviour of a first-class battle-ship in a heavy sea.

The word will be employed in the following pages in a wide and comprehensive sense. We shall have to consider, not only the kind of animal behaviour which implies intelligence, sometimes of a high order; not only such behaviour as animal play and courtship, which suggests emotional attributes; but also forms of behaviour which, if not unconscious, seem to lack conscious guidance and control. We shall deal mainly with the behaviour of the animal as a whole, but also incidentally with that of its constituent particles, or cells; and we shall not hesitate to cite (in a parenthetic section) some episodes of plant life as examples of organic behaviour.

Thus broadly used, the term in all cases indicates and draws attention to the reaction of that which we speak of as behaving, in response to certain surrounding conditions or circumstances which evoke the behaviour. The middy would not talk of the behaviour of his ship as she lay at anchor in Portland harbour; the word is only applicable when there is action and reaction as the vessel ploughs through a heavy sea, or when she answers to the helm. Apart from gravitation the glacier and the river would not “behave in a similar manner.” Only under the conditions comprised under the term “magnetic field” do iron filings exhibit certain peculiarities of behaviour. And so, also, in other cases. The behaviour of cells is evoked under given organic or external conditions; instinctive, intelligent, and emotional behaviour are called forth in response to those circumstances which exercise a constraining influence at the moment of action.

It is therefore necessary, in a discussion of animal behaviour, that we should endeavour to realize, as far as possible, in every case, first, the nature of the animal under consideration; secondly, the conditions under which it is placed; thirdly, the manner in which the response is called forth by the circumstances, and fourthly, how far the behaviour adequately meets the essential conditions of the situation.