Abstract
THE chief interest in foreign text-books is to see how other peoples meet problems of education. In a southern agricultural State such as North Carolina, which stretches from the Allegheny Mountains to Cape Hatteras, it is important that students should be taught about the pests and parasites of man and his crops. But it is still more necessary in a higher educational college that the professor should make his students think for themselves. The author's science is ‘systematised knowledge’, but facts are barren to the student unless he is helped to consider the laws and proximate causes relating to them. Surely here the professor is attempting an impossibility in dealing with the phyla of the animal kingdom in rotation, defining their characters, etc., without his class having acquired any knowledge of the anatomy of any animal in relation to the functions common to all animals. There is, too, a lack of balance, 37 pages of bird classification as compared with 3 pages for fish, while important diseases like bil-harzia, sleeping sickness, hookworm, etc., surely deserve fuller treatment.
A Text-Book of Economic Zoology.
By Prof. Z. P. Metcalf. Pp. x + 392. (Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1930.) 4 dollars.
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A Text-Book of Economic Zoology . Nature 127, 232 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/127232b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/127232b0