Journal of Ihe Hislory of the Behavioral Sciences

Volume 26, July 1990

Foreign Books

Siegfried Jaeger, Ed. Briefe von WorfgangKohler an Hans Geitel1907-1920, mit zwei
Arbeiten Kohlers, ((Uberelektromagnetische Erregung des Trommelfelles”und “In-
telligenzpriifungen am Orang” im Anhang. Nr. 9, Passauer Schriften zur
Psychologiegeschichte, Institut fur Geschichte der Neueren Psychologie der Univer-
sitat Passau, Leitung: W. Traxel. (Letters of Wolfgang Kohler to Hans Geitel
1907-1920, with Two of Kohler’s Works, “On Electromagnetic Stimulation of the
Eardrum” and ‘YntelligenceTests on the Orangutan” Appended. Number 9 of the
series of Passau Contributions to the History of Psychology, Institute for the History
of Recent Psychology, University of Passau, directed by W. Traxel.) Passau, West
Germany: Passavia Universitatsverlag, 1988. 194 pp. (Reviewed by Michael
Wertheimer).
Siegfried Jaeger has made a major contribution to the history of psychology by
preparing this work for publication. Although he is identified modestly on the title page
as editor of the volume, this scholar from the Psychological Institute of the Free Univer-
sity of Berlin has obviously gone to enormous trouble to search relevant sources on both
sides of the Atlantic (as well as going to Tenerife itself, the site of Wolfgang Kohler’s
famous work on the intelligence of anthropoid apes) and has generated almost as much
text in his amazingly thorough notes as in the primary text itself. In spite of their length,
the notes are succinct models of crisp, relevant documentation (identifying individuals,
institutions, and works mentioned by Kohler, and so on); he also managed to find for
this volume more than twenty photographs of people, locations, and apes, a map and
several impressive sketches by Kohler’s wife Thekla, and also a number of Kohler’s own
diagrams from both his letters and his research diaries. Jaeger’s achievement is all the
more impressive in view of the inherent difficulty in deciphering Kohler’s tiny cramped
handwriting: a single sheet from Kohler’s notebooks with its frequent changes and
marginal notes (as reproduced on pages 130-131 in the book) might contain what re-
quires more than three pages of regular print to reproduce in a book. Jaeger also found
several handwritten versions of the second (and main) appendix and clearly devoted
much thought to how best to achieve a coherent, yet reasonably complete, final version.
The history of psychology (indeed the history of science) community owes Jaeger
an immense debt of gratitude. The product of his careful labors generates a picture of
the earlier career of Kohler which complements the versions that abound in history texts
in essential ways. What emerges is, first, that Kohler was from the start a rigorous natural
scientist, indeed a physicist, and that his foray into experimental psychology was from
the perspective of the physics of the early twentieth century-and he never stopped do-
ing original research in physics; second, that Kohler’s brilliant essay on the philosophy
of the natural sciences which helped win him the most prestigious chair in the German-
speaking world of the time in philosophy (and psychology) at Berlin (Die physischen
Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationaren Zustand) in 1922 was the result of careful study
of a very limited set of books on physics, chemistry, biology, and physiology available
to Kohler during his six-year “exile” in the Canary Islands, and of many months of
creative meditation upon the natural sciences from the perspective of Gestalt theory,
in which he had been immersed in Frankfurt some years earlier -an astonishing solitary
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achievement, especially considering that it occurred under trying climatic, financial, pro-
fessional, scholarly, and personal circumstances; and third, that Kohler undertook ex-
tensive experiments on problem solving by a young orangutan, which he did not publish
during his lifetime largely because he was uneasy about studies performed on only a
single exemplar of a species, being aware of extensive individual differences among his
chimpanzee subjects - experiments which not only showed intelligence in tool use com-
parable to that of chimpanzees in his orang, but even yielded evidence of tool making.
What holds the book together is not only Jaeger’s careful scholarship, but also
Kohler’s unseen but powerful and uncompromising personality. It shines through what
otherwise might at first appear a somewhat fragmented volume: a six-page introduction
by the editor providing biographical information about the Gestalt theorist Kohler and
his influential high-school physics teacher Hans Geitel as well as about their student-
teacher relationship, a brief account of the editor’s strategy in searching various archives,
and some gracious acknowledgments; then seventy-six pages of Kohler’s letters to Geitel
(plus drafts of some of Geitel’s answers; none of Geitel’s letters to Kohler have been
unearthed so far) followed by twenty-six small-print pages of Jaeger’s notes to the letters
and a three-page index of names referred to in the letters (and notes); eight pages
reproduce photocopies of Kohler’s 1915 article, which has hardly ever been cited before,
in the obscure Festschrift for Geitel (and his colleague Julius Elster), which reports an
ingenious mechanical technique for stimulating the eardrum, as fitting sequel to Kohler’s
earlier daring work on recording the movement of the eardrum during acoustic stimula-
tion; finally, fifty-one pages (followed again by eight pages of small-print editor’s notes)
are devoted to Kohler’s unpublished manuscript on intelligence tests on the orangutan.
Interspersed among these pages are appropriate illustrations, the sources of which are
listed at the very end of this physically slim but substantively packed volume.
Kohler’s devotion to his science mentor Geitel, strengthened by his spending a sum-
mer in Geitel’s research laboratory (Geitel was a productive physicist, mathematician,
and inventor who published more than a hundred research articles), is evident in his
letters to him; they are riddled with original experiments, as well as ideas for experiments,
in various fields in physics. Geitel’s relation to his former student is also illustrated by
Geitel’s significant help to Kohler in arranging for publication of Kohler’s book on
physical Gestalten while Kohler was still “marooned” in Tenerife (pp. 60-90). Kohler’s
precocity and ingenuity are clear in his insightful original ideas for physics experiments
even in his early twenties, as well as in his obtaining the doctorate with some acoustic
experiments (including attaching a tiny mirror to his eardrum, so that a light beam
directed at it could, by reflection, record its movements when stimulated by a sound)
at the early age of twenty-two. He continued his acoustic experiments in Tenerife after
arriving there early in 1914 to the extent possible given the poor local technical oppor-
tunity available. He even glued tiny iron filings to his own eardrum so as to permit elec-
tromagnetic (rather than acoustic) stimulation of the auditory apparatus, a procedure
described in the article Kohler prepared for Geitel’s Festschrift for his sixtieth birthday
(the article is reproduced in the first appendix to Jaeger’s book on pages 122-129).
The feat of creating his highly influential and original monograph on Gestalten in
the natural sciences, while he was intellectually isolated and without access to a library
at the Tenerife anthropoid research station, is indirectly indicated in the letters (passim)
through requests for recent reprints and regrets at not having access to adequate scholarly
resources. The young philosopher-scientist wrote in 1915 to Geitel (p. 5 5 ) how grateful
he was to him for some advice Geitel had given him years before when Kohler had in-
292 BOOK REVIEWS

dicated that he wished to study philosophy: Geitel had told him that the only hope for
achieving anything in this field must be to base it on thorough study of mathematics
and the natural sciences. Kohler indicated that he tried to follow this advice and shud-
dered to think that he almost had not: the danger of picayune and fruitless “literariness”
is so great, and he was grateful to Geitel for having rescued him from that horrible fate.
Clearly he remembered much from his earlier formal education and was able to use
it from memory in fruitful and often radically reorganized form in his major work on
the ubiquity of Gestalten in the physical and chemical world of natural science.
Perhaps most impressive of all within the volume is the previously unpublished report
(pp. 132-183) on intelligence tests on the orangutan. Apparently intended as a regular
installment in the series of reports from the anthropoid station (of which the well-known
The Mentality of Apes, better translated as Intelligence Tests on Anthropoid Apes, which
reported primarily the famous problem-solving experiments on chimpanzees, was a part),
it presents both general observations and the results of specific experiments with
orangutans between 1916 and 1920. Originally both a young female and a young male
orangutan arrived at the station at Kohler’s request, but the male soon died, so early
that it was impossible to engage in extensive experiments with him. However, the female
remained healthy and exhibited many instances of insightful behavior, but not always
in problems that Kohler intentionally set for her. For example, she discovered the use
of rocks as hammers in destroying the foundation underneath the bars of her cage, which
was composed of loosely cemented sand, gravel, and stones (pp. 146-147). For hours
on end she would hammer away at particular locations on the foundation, discarding
smaller in favor of larger stones as a tool for her excavations-excavations that were
occasionally so successful that she made a hole large enough to escape through. After
escaping, she began to wail, apparently at the unfamiliarity of the setting in which she
then found herself, and she was seemingly grateful to be found again and brought back
to her accustomed setting.
The young female orang, Catalina, found manifold uses for her sleeping blanket,
such as hanging it from the bars of her cage to swing on or hefting it toward a just-out-
of-reach banana or piece of bread outside the bars, while holding on to one end of it,
to drag the desired food object within reach (pp. 140, 155). In using her blanket to swing
on, she typically first tested the fairly ragged piece of cloth as if to make sure that it
would hold her weight. There were many other instances of clearly insightful behavior,
such as when Kohler was about to push the feeding plate full of milk into her traveling
cage soon after she had arrived at the anthropoid station (p. 145). There was a crack
about an inch high just above the floor, through which the plate had been inserted before,
but the crack had been stuffed with straw from her bedding and the plate could no longer
be passed in. Kohler waited to see what would happen. Catalina looked at him and at
the plate through the bars of her cage, then at the crack, and without further ado
energetically and completely removed the straw from the crack, and Kohler was able
to insert the plate with ease.
Perhaps the most impressive of Catalina’s achievements can only be described as
genuine tool making (p. 176). A basket with food was placed just out of her reach beyond
the vertical bars of her cage, and there were no sticks, blankets, or other tools available
inside the cage. She then climbed to the main wooden beam that supported the wire
roof of her cage and chewed on it until a large splinter came off. She went down to
the front of the cage with it to try to reach the food, but the splinter was too short.
She looked up at the beam, climbed to it again, and gnawed at it once more-but this
 BOOK REVIEWS 293

time with great care that the splinter not break off while it was still to short. Indeed
she seemed to glance down at the previously gnawed splinter and at the distance from
bars to basket while hanging from the ceiling wires, stopping her gnawing as if to make
sure that the length of the resulting splinter would suffice. Smaller ones that happened
to result from her energetic attack she let fall and ignored. She descended only after
having created a staff that was clearly longer than the preceding one. To her disappoint-
ment, this one was not quite long enough either. Yet she climbed back up once more
and gnawed tenaciously until a weak stick of the necessary length actually did break
off and with it she succeeded in solving the problem.
Like every published work, this one suffers from a few typographical errors, but
these few problems can be ignored. This is altogether the first-rate product of a first-
rate mind, carefully compiled by a first-rate editor. Anyone who can read German should
read it, and anyone who cannot read German should learn to do so, so as to be able
to read it.

Journal of the Hisrory of the Behavioral Sciences

Volume 26, July 1990

Josef Broiek and Horst Gundlach, Eds. G. T. Fechner and Psychology: Proceedings
of the International Gustav Theodor Fechner Symposium, Passau, 12 to 14 June,
1987. Passauer Schriften zur Psychologiegeschichte,No. 6. Passau: Passavia Univer-
sitatsverlag, 1988, 298 pp.
Horst Gundlach. Index Psychophysicus: Bio- und bibliographischerIndex zu Fechners
Elementen der Psychophysik und den Parerga (User’s Guide in English). Passauer
Schriften zur Psychologiegeschichte, No. 7. Passau: Passavia Universitatsverlag,
1988. xvii + 110 pp.
(Reviewed by Katherine Arens)
These two volumes are intended to rekindle academic interest in G. T. Fechner
(1801-1887), a major German psychologist and physiologist. In this long career at Leipzig
University, Fechner united work in the natural sciences with aesthetics, psychophysics,
and physics, while at the same time pursuing an active career as a writer of textbooks
and humorous prose, a translator, an editor, and encyclopedist. He was thus one of
the towering figures in psychology in his day and beyond, often cited as one of the in-
direct teachers of the generation that came to maturity just before 1900. Moreover,
Fechner’s influence was (and to some degree, is still) strong in many fields and in many
countries. As such, one would expect that scholars would have devoted much energy
to him and his work. Yet Fechner has suffered the fate of many nineteenth-century
psychologist-scientists: almost eighty years have elapsed since the last book-length treat-
ment of his work.
That Fechner has been neglected may be, in part, an accident of history. Only com-
paratively recently (beginning less than a quarter-century ago) has the history of
psychology emerged as an active discipline in the German-speaking countries. Too, Ger-
man historical scholarship in general remains seriously disrupted because of the Nazi
era (its arguments are being played out in the press today, under the rubic of the
“Historikerstreit,” or “historians’ debate,” with figures such as Jiirgen Habermas at the
center of the conflict).