The physical basis of personality / by V.H. Mottram.

  • Vernon Mottram
Date:
[1944]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The physical basis of personality / by V.H. Mottram. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Any observer of animals must have seen reactions in them which demanded, almost, the projection upon them of terms usually used to describe the characteristics of human beings. Pavlov, the great Russian physiologist, descried in his dogs characters^ reminiscent of the humours of Galenic medicine— the phlegmatic, the sanguine and so on—and it is difficult not to descry in them hysteria and neurasthenia, so closely do their reactions resemble those of human beings. In such lowly animals as frogs there are indications of marked differences not only in external appearance but in reactions which one is tempted to term psychological. They will behave differently towards artificial feeding—some will accept it, others will put up marked resistance. (Indeed, some forty years ago, in the days of Tariff controversies, the writer named one of his animals Joseph because he so strongly objected to foreign imports.) In the poultry yard something markedly akin to personality is seen. A hen, in the absence of a normal mate, may take upon herself the dominance of the hen run, behaving in many ways with the arrogance and aggressiveness of a cock. I have not only observed this but a change over from marked masculine attributes to the meekest of femininity on the introduction into the fowl run of a squire. The reverse change has been described by Crew (and incidentally much earlier by the Roman historian Livy). A hen, after a year of normal henny characteristics, had become dominating and cocky in her relations with the rest of her sisters, but in this instance, not only did the hen imitate the male in her protective care of the other dames but she grew cocky feathers, comb and spurs and actually begat a number of chickens before her sacrifice on the altar of genetics, when it was discovered that avian tuberculosis had destroyed her ovaries and that from undifferentiated germinal tissue she had grown testes. Her psychology and her sex had changed pari passu as the result of a clinical mishap—a clear instance of personality, if you will forgive the term as applied to a hen, being based upon physical make-up. These instances of the influence of physical changes on the behaviour pattern of animals are given first because much of our knowledge of the influence of the endocrine organs (the so-called glands of personality) has been obtained by experiments upon animals and only later confirmed by observations upon man, and second, because most biologists believe, and increasingly are