Biology

Abstract

IT is often profitable to present old knowledge in new ways, and this Prof. Messer has done by rejecting the method of teaching zoology by means of selected types and treating the systems of organs from a comparative point of view. the book is a compilation, and makes no claim to originality of knowledge or treatment. But the author maintains that the ‘systemic method’ is more satisfactory than the ‘type-study method’ both in the lecture room and the laboratory. The American student taking a one-year course is taught the comparative embryo-logical, histological and anatomical aspects of each system of organs from cyclostomes to man, without, so far as can be ascertained from the book, studying a system in detail in any one animal or relating that system to the body as a whole. Herein, in the reviewer's opinion, lies the weakness of the method, since the elementary student has no standard or basis for comparison.

An Introduction to Vertebrate Anatomy

By Harold Madison Messer. Pp. xvi+406. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938.) 16s. net.