The authors of the article connect a number of fundamental errors of the crowd researchers of the late 19 century with uncritically assimilated approaches of natural scientists of that time. In particular, this is an excessive generalization of the concept of a crowd, its distribution to social associations of other types, subjectivity in identifying attribute attributes of a spontaneous group, as well as an analysis of the phenomenon outside the situational, social, economic and political context of its existence. The doctrine of mental atavism, based on the ideas of evolutionists, which described the activation of extra-rational motives inherited from animal ancestors, did not provide an adequate explanation for the influence of spontaneous groups on their members. According to the authors of the article, all this, together with borrowed examples of anthropomorphic interpretations of animal behavior, played a negative role in the fact that the first theories of the crowd were not developed in the future.