erest to seek this contact. But his concern ought to
go still further. He has to fight the animals that threaten his
harvest.

The farmer himself knows quite well how important the psychical
behaviour of the animals is for his success. He knows how the milk of
the cows is influenced by emotional excitement, and how the handling
of horses demands an understanding of their mental dispositions and
temperaments. Sometimes he even works already with primitive
psychological methods. He makes use of the mental instinct which draws
insects to the light when he attracts the dangerous moths with light
at night in order to destroy them. Ultimately all the traps and nets
with which the enemies of the crop are caught are schemes for which
psychotechnical calculations are decisive. The means for breaking the
horses, down to the whip and the spur and the blinders, are after all
the tools of applied psychology. The manufacturer is already
beginning to supply the farmer with some practical psychology: dogs
which despise the ordinary dog biscuits, seem quite satisfied with the
same cheap foods when they are manufactured in the form of bones. The
dog first plays with them and then eats them. There is no reason why
everything should be left to mere tradition and chance in a field in
which the methods are sufficiently developed to give exact practical
results, as soon as distinct practical questions are raised. There
would be no difficulty in measuring the reaction times of the horses
in thousandths of a second for optical and acoustical and tactual
impressions, or in studying the influence of artificial colour effects
on the various insects in the service of agriculture.

Especial importance may be attached to those investigations in animal
psychology which trace the inheritance of individual characteristics.
The laboratory psychologist studies, for instance, the laws according
to which qualities like savageness and tameness are distributed in the
succeeding generations. He studies the proportions of those traits in
hundreds of mice, which are especially fit for the experiment on
account of their quick multiplication. But this may lead immediately
to important results for the farmers with reference to mental traits
in breeding animals. It would be misleading if it were denied that
all this is a programme to-day and not a realization, a promise and
not a fulfilment. The field is practically still uncultivated. But in
a time in which the n