edited from the author's posthumous works by Agnes von Cranach translated by Robert D. Martin Here Am I—Where Are You?: The Behavior of the Greylag Goose was thought to be Konrad Lorenz's last book. However, in 1991 the "Russian Manuscript" was discovered in an attic and its subsequent publication in German has become a scientific sensation. Written under the most extreme conditions in Soviet prison camps, the "Russian Manuscript" was the first outline of a large-scale work on behavioral science. This translation, meticulously edited by his daughter, Agnes von Cranach, contains a synopsis of all the ideas that made Lorenz famous as the founder of ethology, the study of comparative animal behavior. The "Russian Manuscript" was originally planned in 1944 as the first segment of an extended work when the author was Professor of Psychology in Konigsberg. After the war ended, Lorenz, then a prisoner, wrote this first part in Russian camps near Kirov and Yerevan. Later he was allowed to take the manuscript—written on paper sacks and other fragments—back to Austria, where he used it as the basis for such major publications as Behind the A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge . In 1963-64, the manuscript disappeared, much to Lorenz's distress, and was not recovered until nearly two years after his death.
Author
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, developing an approach that began with an earlier generation, including his teacher Oskar Heinroth. Lorenz studied instinctive behavior in animals, especially in greylag geese and jackdaws. Working with geese, he investigated the principle of imprinting, the process by which some nidifugous birds (i.e. birds that leave their nest early) bond instinctively with the first moving object that they see within the first hours of hatching. Although Lorenz did not discover the topic, he became widely known for his descriptions of imprinting as an instinctive bond. In 1936 he met Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, and the two collaborated in developing ethology as a separate sub-discipline of biology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lorenz as the 65th most cited scholar of the 20th century in the technical psychology journals, introductory psychology textbooks, and survey responses.
