Beginning around 1905, Zeliony, along with colleagues in Pavlov’s laboratory, performed experiments on dogs (Zeliony 1906b: 80; Delabarre 1910: 85-86; Warden 1928: 507): Experiments conducted by M. Pawlow and his pupils add confirmation to the view that “all physiological phenomena may be completely studied as if psychical phenomena had no existence.”[3] Direct excitation of the mouth cavity of a dog produces an “unconditional” reflex secretion of the saliva.
Pavlov, in his eighth lecture on conditioned reflexes, describes one of Zeliony's experiments: A conditioned alimentary reflex was established to the simultaneous application of the tone of a pneumatic tuning-fork, which was considerably damped by being placed within a wooden box coated with wool, and of a visual stimulus of three electric lamps placed in front of the dog in the slightly shaded room (Pavlov 1927: 142–143 [Lecture VIII]).
Both these sounds appeared to the human ear to be of equal intensity, and both when tested separately elicited a secretion of 19 drops of saliva during one minute.
[4] On March 19, 1909, Zeliony presented a paper before the Saint Petersburg Philosophical Society in which he called for a special natural science to study the physical side of human interrelations.
[10] Though Zeliony was still officially an employee of the state-run laboratory under Pavlov's leadership, in 1921, he attempted to found his own institute for the study of animal behaviour.
[11] Around the same time, Zeliony worked with P. A. Sorokin and other sociologists in both the Russian Sociological Society and the Circle for the Objective Study of Human Social and Individual Behaviour.
Using Bechterev’s shock-reinforcement technique with three dogs operated on in 1928, the objective was to determine the minimal essential functional cortex to establish conditioning (Poltyreff & Zeliony, 1929, 1930).
According to him, “these two workers disappeared from the scene, and it was very difficult to communicate with specific people in Russia if they did not hold key positions” (Mettler, Note 1).