title: Niko Tinbergen: A Message in the Archives.
abstract: Just as biologists have their favored places for doing research, so do historians. As someone who likes working in archives, the most surprising thing the present author ever found was a particular letter that had been written to him by the ethologist Niko Tinbergen-but that Tinbergen had never sent. The letter included a detailed critique of the intellectual style and conceptual shortcomings of Tinbergen's career-long friend and colleague Konrad Lorenz. The present author first saw the letter 3 years after Tinbergen's death and 10 years after the letter was composed. Here we discuss the contents and historical context of that letter.
authors.affiliation: Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA. burkhard@illinois.edu.
authors.forename: Richard W
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-4442-9063
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Burkhardt
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001109:Archives; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D015709:Correspondence as Topic / Q000266:history*; D005010:Ethology / Q000266:history*; D049673:History, 20th Century
keywords: Archives; Ernst Mayr; Ethology; Field naturalist; Franz Liszt; Konrad Lorenz; Niko Tinbergen; Orangutan