COMPARATIVE VERTEBRATE ANATOMY

Abstract

THOSE who teach zoology and know the labour of abstracting the works of living comparative anatomists in an effort to amend the mistakes and imperfections of current text-books will find in Miss Hyman's book an accurate presentation of modern facts and views. Since Wiedersheim and Kingsley wrote their text-books on comparative anatomy, so much has been added to knowledge that our generation can no longer accept wholly their evidence or their opinions. What Miss Hyman has attempted is a comprehensive study of research treatises in order that she can dispense with dogmatic assertions and present the subject as a living, moving science, “to give the student a picture of a vast field full of controversial issues and unsolved problems, depending for their solution on future painstaking embryological and anatomical researches”. We are wholeheartedly in sympathy with her aims, and congratulate her on the success that has crowned her efforts. She has demonstrated to the zoological world that despite present trends and fashions, morphology is not 'played out', as some would have us believe, but is still the foundation of zoology, which the physiologist, the experimentalist and all other sub-sections, of the science cannot ignore.

Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy

By Libbie Henrietta Hyman. Second edition. Pp. xx+544. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Cambridge University Press, 1942.) 3.50 dollars.