“My object being the study of the correlative instincts of the young and adult in relation to all that could be learned about them in a natural environment, I have followed my usual custom of going out to the birds, instead of taking them into the laboratory. The facts which the laboratory can be made to yield are invaluable, but they belong to a different class from those for which we are now mainly in search, behavior under the usual or normal conditions.”--F. H. HERRICK (1910). “As will be seen, these studies include both field and laboratory work, especially of the American species, and I have made the field work emphatic wherever at all practicable. I have elsewhere (1909, p. 157) [Jour. Exp. Zoöl., Vol. VII] emphasized the crying need for larger attention to this phase of experimental work, believing that in many cases it is all but impossible to secure trustworthy results as to behavior of animals where the work has been done under such unusual, unnatural and artificial conditions as most laboratory provisions afford. What right has one to assume that the actions of an animal taken rudely from its natural habitat and as rudely imprisoned in some improvised cage are in any scientific sense an expression of its normal behavior, either physical or psychical? Is it within the range of the calculus of probability that conclusions drawn from observations made upon an animal in the shallow confines of a finger-bowl, but whose habitat has been the open sea, are wholly trustworthy? It is no part of my purpose to discredit the laboratory or laboratory appliances as related to such investigations. They are indispensable. But at the same time let it be recognized that they are at best but artificial make-shifts whose values, unless checked up by constant appeal to nature, must be taken at something of discount.... It seems to the writer that until one has been able to place his specimens under conditions approximating the natural, or has at least brought them to a state of semi-domestication, where in food-taking, evidence of health, etc., they are at ease, he has small right to dogmatize as to conclusions, or presume to make such conclusions the basis of so-called laws of behavior. Not a little of recent investigation along the lines of behavior has been vitiated at just this point, and must be repeated to be made trustworthy. The amazing mass of contradictory results which has loaded the literature of recent years is attributable to some extent to this misfortune.”--C. W. HARGITT (1912).