ABSTRACT
Myrtle B. Mcgraw's research was overshadowed by Arnold Gesell's work largely because most researchers in child development believed erroneously that her studies supported Gesell's maturationist theory. Most contemporary researchers have been generally unaware, until that George Ellett Coghill's ideas and methods played a prominent and more instrumental role in McGraw's research than that of her rival, Gesell. Perhaps the most distinctive and significant feature, setting McGraw and Gesell's infant studies apart from their contemporaries, was their common interest in drawing from embryology to illuminate the processes of behavioral development. McGraw confronted her doubts about age-based norms by adopting methods that would more clearly identify how growth processes account for the transient forms that behavior assumes in the course of development. McGraw hypothesized that the degree of integration of human behavior depended upon the relationship between ontogenetic patterns of an origin and older phyletic traits.
