JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Non-representational art was still nearly twenty years in the future when this lovely cartographic artwork was published in 1894. And what we are seeing here in the collection of circles and spirals is a representation of three trials of a homing pigeon finding its way home in the Lake Monona region of Madison, Wisconsin. C.F. Hodge Ph.D. (of Clark University, psychology) wrote "The Method of Homing Pigeons" for Popular Science Monthly (volume 24, 1894), showing at least in this found instance that behavioralists (yet named at this point) enjoyed working with pigeons well before C.B. Ferster recommended them over rats to B.F. Skinner (mainly because, as Ferster said, he didn't like rats).
Actually Hodge was more of a neuro/pathology person, but for now I'm just interested in the artwork generated by his experiments.
Hodge asks himself an itneresting question at the start of the experiment:
"When Sir John Lubbock rotated a paper disk upon which ants were moving in a given direction and the ants turned so as to maintain their course, it seemed as if they were endowed with some mysterious sense or power of direction, like that of a magnetic needle upon its pivot. When he substituted for the plain disk a circular hat-box, which, as he thought, must constitute for an ant the entire visible universe, and still the ants turned as the box was rotated, the fact seemed proved. Ants must have located within their bodies, and independent of ordinary sensory impressions from the external world, the power of going in any direction they wish. This conclusion is far reaching in its consequences. If ants possess such mysterious power, may it not exist in other, or all, animals? It must be of the nature of a special sense. Where, then, is the sense organ? How should ideas of animal sensation be modified by it?
And concludes, too quickly:
"These differences become emphasized by use, as we find in the sight of the sailor or savage, or in the touch of the blind. There is every reason why we should expect to find such differences much more pronounced between different species of animals. So marked, in fact, do they appear that the tempta- tion has always been to declare them differences in kind. Before doing this, we ought to make a beginning, at least, to learn the possibilities of the senses as they exist in different animals. So far as the writer has gone in this direction, he is content to con- clude that they are using the ordinary senses, highly refined, it may be, by generations of development ; and the every-day logic which tells man and animal alike that the shortest path between two points is a straight line."
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