SIGNED. Chimpanzees: A Laboratory Colony

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943. First edition.

1943 ILLUSTRATED MONOGRAPH ON THE STUDY OF CHIMPANZEE BEHAVIOR BY LEADING AMERICAN PRIMATOLOGIST ROBERT YERKES--INSCRIBED TO A NEIGHBOR AND SIGNED BY HIM.

9 1/2 inches tall hardcover, publisher's red cloth binding, gilt title to spine, xv, 321 pp, 63 full-page photoplates, 24 text-figures. There is an ink inscription signed by the author to Anne Vance, dated August 1943, on the front endpaper: "Anne Vance/ Our neighborly neighbor, whom ape fanatics will not bore, neither will they edify. What, then, remains but to entertain. Robert M. Yerkes, August, 1943."

ROBERT MEANS YERKES (1876 - 1956) was an American psychologist, ethologist, and primatologist best known for his work in intelligence testing and in the field of comparative psychology. Yerkes was a pioneer in the study both of human and primate intelligence and of the social behavior of gorillas and chimpanzees. Along with John D. Dodson, Yerkes developed the Yerkes-Dodson law relating arousal to performance. Yerkes had a long and storied fascination with the study of chimpanzees. He had spent time observing chimpanzees in Cuba at Madame Abreu's colony in the early 1920s, and had returned from the trip determined to raise and observe chimps on his own. He began by purchasing two chimpanzees, Chim and Panzee, from a zoo. He brought the two chimps home, where they lived in a bedroom and ate with a fork at a miniature table. Chim was a particular delight for Yerkes, and the summer that chimp and psychologist spent together is memorialized in Almost Human (1924). In 1924, Yerkes was hired as a professor of psychobiology, a field he pioneered, at Yale University. He founded the Yale University Laboratories of Primate Biology in New Haven, followed by his Anthropoid Breeding and Experiment Station in Orange Park, Florida, with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation. The primate language Yerkish was developed there.