IN THE NINETEEN-TEENS a Norwegian scholar working in zoology, psychology, and sociology, ThorleifSchjelderup-Ebbe (1894), made studies in the social organization of various birds, particularly of hens, that were published in Germany in the nineteen-twenties.' Sch.-E. (as he is conveniently referred to in other German articles) was interested in various relationships among the fowls, in social hierarchy, 'despot' actions, and from the nature of his subjects often uses hacken ('to peck') and a long line of compound nouns including Hackliste, Hackkombination, Hackrichtung, and (though rather sparingly) Hackordnung 'peck order.' His work attracted immediate attention among zoologists and social psychologists in Europe and America and has given us the term peck order or pecking order, which after a few years of use by specialists escaped into the general vocabulary, though it is not yet recorded in our general dictionaries.2 The earliest English use of the term in print that I have found is in the 1927 translation of Friedrich Alverdes's Tiersoziologie, which had appeared in 1925: