ABSTRACT
The similarity between anecdotal accounts of the habits of animals and ethnological accounts of the ways of primitive peoples makes it easy to under-stand why the two are so readily discussed together. Both are records of external forms of behaviour, records amplified in the case of man by introspective analysis and embroidered in the case of the animal with anthro-pomorphic interpretation. But although the ethno-logical approach is at present the only practicable way to knowledge of human social behaviour, the anecdotal method is already discredited in animal sociology, and has begun to give way before the methods of ecology and physiology. Apart from this, there are reasons which invalidate comparisons between the external forms of human and animal behaviour. Indeed, much could be said for divorcing the study of man’s behaviour from that of other animals in relation to the subject matter of sociological discussion.
