There are probably several links to Mark Twain's story, including those that prompted him to write this funny text. In American psychology, research into stimulus-reactions was already well advanced, the main field of work of which was basically physiology. John Watson's programmatic text has also found the term for the direction this type of research took: Behaviorism. But this is only a hypothesis, because Watson's text was published in 1913, but evolutionary and biological findings (also in the sense of Social Darwinism) were at a certain climax in culture and science in the USA after 1900.

I am thinking about designing a lesson or some discussion questions that include some historical thinking of scientists and non scientists and comparing that work to how ideas change as new evidence is discovered.