Creating a Chimpanzee Community **

The following narrative by Robert M. Yerkes of his creation of the famous colony of chimpanzees at Orange Park, Florida, has been extracted by his daughter, Roberta W. Yerkes, from an extensive autobiographical manuscript. Readers of this selective account might think Professor Yerkes a man of one idea. So he was, for from 1916 to the end of his life, a period of 40 years, he thought, planned, and worked on the idea of a laboratory devoted to studying the behavior and mental activities of the higher apes. Yet this unceasing attention to one aim did not distract him from widely ranging cultural interests nor prevent him from serving his country in peace and war. Robert Mearns Yerkes received his degree of doctor of philosophy at Harvard in 1902, and taught comparative psychology there from 1901 to 1917. His well-known monograph on The Dancing Mouse, written during this period, exemplifies his sound foundation of psychological study upon a broad base of experimental biology. During World War I he was in charge of psychological examining in the army, serving as chief of the Division of Psychology in the Office of the Surgeon General. He was chairman, in 1919-24, of the Research Information Service of the National Research Council. In 1924 Dr. Yerkes accepted a call to Yale University as professor of psychology, becoming professor of psychobiology in 1929. In connection with the enterprise he describes in the following recollections, he also organized a laboratory of primate biology in the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven. No account of Professor Yerkes, even a brief introduction such as this, would be complete without mention of his organization, and his direction for twenty-five years, of the National Research Council's Committee for Research in Problems of Sex. Drawn into consideration of this subject by his studies of the chimpanzee and other animals, he undertook