Masters and Pupils among the American Psychologists

Pledge, in his Science since 1500, gives three master-and-pupil charts which show the presumptive intellectual genealogy of scientists.1 These charts make interesting reading. Here, for instance, is Pavlov, who was a student of Heidenhain's and also, along with Pfliiger, a student of Ludwig's. Ludwig has no ancestry showing on this chart, but the line through Heidenhain (whose sibling was Ehrlich) goes back through Cohnheim to Virchow to Johannes Miiller. Would it not be interesting, we thought, to attempt to make a similar chart for modern American psychologists? This paper shows the result of our attempt. There arose first the question of how to select American psychologists for study, and it seemed natural for us to take the 119 psychologists who have been starred in the first seven editions of American Men of Science.2 Of these persons 47 were dead and 72 were living. For the dead we filled in the names of the teachers with whom they 'took their degrees,' or we looked up the relationship in biographical data about them, or, when still in doubt, we wrote to some living person who had been associated with the deceased psychologist in the laboratory in which he did his doctoral research and asked which older man seemed to have been primarily responsible for the younger man's thesis and degree. Our experience with the living shows that we may easily have made some errors with the dead. There can be no doubt that Cattell was Wundt's student, even though he resisted so many influences of the Leipzig Institute and disapproved of them. Both Wundt and Cattell have