Practical Histology

Abstract

THIS book is an embodiment of directions for practical work in animal histology, which the author, as the result of twenty years' experience, has been led to regard as best suited to the requirements of the elementary student, with the greater part of those of the histological section of the last edition of the “Practical Physiology and Histology,” by Sir M. Foster and himself—one of the best established of the famous red-cover series of didactic manuals for students, which have done so much for the practical side of modern scientific instruction. The body of the book (286 pp.) is divided into thirty-six lessons, of which the first eight are devoted to methods and the use of the microscope and microtome. Those numbering nine to thirty-five are set aside for the tissues and organs, and the thirty-sixth deals very slenderly with the main facts of cell-division. In each of these “lessons” there are first given such accounts of the organs arid tissues as are necessary for manipulative purposes, and descriptions of methods of treatment likely to yield constant results in the student's hands. There follows for each lesson, under the heading “Demonstrations,” a list of objects to be correlatively studied or examined; and finally (in small type) a series of “Notes,” having reference to cognate and alternative objects of interest and to methods supplementary to those described in the body of the lesson, with especial reference to such as require particular skill and attention or are variable and uncertain in their action. Apropos of this arrangement (which is but an extension of that adopted for the volumes which preceded the present one) and the “Notes,” the author points out, with commendable care, that he has been careful to avoid making manipulation too much of an end in itself; and he thereby introduces a welcome check to the tendency on the part of pure histology to lapse into a mere laborious idleness.

Practical Histology.

By J. N. Langley Pp. viii + 340. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1901.) Price 6s.