4 
HUGO MUNSTERBERG 
In the following year Professor James withdrew from the experi¬ 
mental work, and the conduct of the laboratory was given over to 
me. In the years which followed, Dr. Arthur Pierce, Dr. J. E. Lough, 
and Dr. Robert MacDougall were the assistants until three years ago, 
when the development of the laboratory demanded a division of the 
assistant functions; since that time Dr. E. B. Holt has been the assist¬ 
ant for the work in human psychology, while Dr. R. M. Yerkes has 
had charge of the work in comparative psychology. Since from the 
first I laid special emphasis on research work, a greater number of 
small rooms was soon needed. In the year 1893, we divided a part 
of the adjacent lecture-room into four rooms for special investigations, 
and two years later the larger of the two original rooms was divided 
into five. As the lecture-room also was finally made part of the re¬ 
search laboratory, we had at last eleven rooms in Dane Hall. The 
activities of the laboratory, however, went far beyond the research 
work. We had regular training-courses in experimental practice, and 
the lecture courses in human and in comparative psychology drew 
largely on the resources of our instrument cases. Yet the original 
investigations absorbed the main energy of the laboratory', and de¬ 
manded a steady expansion of its apparatus. An illustrated catalogue 
of the instruments has been published as part of the Harvard Exhi¬ 
bition at the Chicago World’s Fair. 
The participation of the students has been controlled by a prin¬ 
ciple which has characterized our Harvard work through all these 
years, and distinguished it from the methods of most other institu¬ 
tions. I insist that no student shall engage in one investigation only, 
but that every one who has charge of a special problem shall give 
to it only half of his working time, while in the other half he is to be 
subject in four, five, or more investigations by other members of the 
laboratory. In this way each research is provided with the desirable 
number of subjects, and all one-sidedness is avoided. Every experi¬ 
menter thus comes in contact with a large range of problems and 
gets a fair training in manifold observations, besides the opportunity 
for concentration on a special research. It is true that this demands 
a complicated schedule and careful consideration of the special needs 
of every research, but it gives to the work a certain freshness and 
vividness, and banishes entirely the depression which is unavoidable 
whenever a student is for any length of time a passive subject in one 
psychological enquiry only. In both capacities, as experimenter and 
as observing subject, only graduate students have been acceptable. 
In this way about one hundred investigations on human psychology