Douglas Spalding

Douglas Alexander Spalding (* around 1840 in London, † 1877) was first worked in London as a laborer and later moved to Scotland about in the near Aberdeen. There the philosopher Alexander Bain, the University of Aberdeen moved to permit Spalding complimentary access to the lectures. Spalding studied philosophy and literature, but walked out after one year back to London. Soon he contracted tuberculosis and traveled through half of Europe, hoping to find somewhere healing. In Avignon he met John Stuart Mill and through him Viscount Amberley know, the son of former British Prime Minister Lord John Russell, who hired him in England as a private tutor for his son - the young Bertrand Russell.

Spalding led some remarkable experiments in the field of animal behavior, and described thereon, inter alia, a phenomenon that later became known as Oskar Heinroth embossing ( 1900); in German-speaking countries, the term was then made ​​known especially for Konrad Lorenz. So Spalding already recognized the importance of the interplay between innate and acquired behavior and the benefits of experiments in behavioral research - and was so far ahead of his time.

His works are today virtually unknown, although the biologist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane some of his findings in the 1950s, made ​​accessible, even in professional circles - apparently to show that far from Konrad Lorenz had alone are considered the founders of ethology. William Thorpe wrote in 1979 in The Origin and Rise of Ethology that Spalding had come for the honor solely because of his early death, to take as the founder of behavioral biology in the story.