REVIEWS 577 



electrical response or of irritability of plants in general. Of course many of the 

 problems investigated lie on the border-line between physics and biology, and 

 this volume shows clearly the advantages and disadvantages of an attack on 

 such problems by one who is mainly a physicist. Cannot Prof. Bose, with his 

 knowledge of physics, his great ingenuity in devising apparatus and experiments, 

 and his interest in biological problems, find some sound biologist with whom he 

 could collaborate in what should be an almost ideal partnership ? 



V. H. Black man. 



Text-book of Zoology. By H. G. Wells and A. M. Davies. Sixth Edition. 

 Revised by J. T. Cunningham. [Pp. viii 4- 487.] (University Tutorial 

 Press, London, 1913. Price 6s. 6d.) 



In theory, the proper persons to conduct university examinations are the teachers 

 who have conducted the course, who already know something of the capacities 

 and attainments of the candidates, and who can set the papers so as to make 

 them an adequate test of the fashion in which the students have taken advantage 

 of the range of teaching offered to them. Where the examiner knows precisely 

 what the candidate ought to know, the apparent difficulty of the paper ought to be 

 great, and the standard of the pass mark ought to be high. But it is a hard world, 

 and there is competition even between universities and amongst the schools of 

 a university. 



Students who attend a teaching university expect to pass its examinations, and 

 attain its degrees, and it simply does not do if this achievement be made too 

 hard for them. In theory a university that was merely or chiefly an examining 

 body, that knew its candidates only by their examination papers and the 

 examination fees they had to tender, was a poor mechanical thing. In practice 

 the University of London, before its translation to South Kensington and the 

 emergence of its internal side into the arena of competition, certainly secured a 

 very high standard of attainment from its successful candidates. However you 

 chose to sneer at them as the products of an artificial system, you could not 

 doubt but they had acquired a large body of exact knowledge and had attained 

 the art of exhibiting it at the stimulus of examination papers. Many of the 

 applicants for degrees came from the remote provinces, where they had to depend 

 on their own unaided efforts to find in books what was necessai-y for the syllabus. 

 For such persons the system of tuition by correspondence was devised, and the 

 members of an able staff learned the special needs and difficulties of isolated 

 students, and after such experience, wrote a set of text-books of which Mr. Wells's 

 "Zoology " is an excellent example. It is now in its sixth edition, and has been 

 revised and brought up to date successively by Mr. A. M. Davies and Mr. J. T. 

 Cunningham. It must be judged entirely from its genesis and purpose ; criticisms 

 of the system cannot be applied fairly to a book adapted to the system. From 

 this standpoint it is almost miraculously good. It is self-explanatory, well- 

 arranged, comprehensive, and precise. Even the diagrams are such as could be 

 reproduced in an examination. Mr. Cunningham, perhaps, ought to have 

 explained that his pemmican chapter on evolution was a summary of his own 

 views rather than those of "the ablest biologists from the time of Darwin to the 

 present day," but a fair examiner reading an answer based on the chapter would 

 only laugh and give the necessary marks. It would be more serious, however, if 

 an unlucky candidate were to reproduce the word " Echmodermata" for " Echino- 

 derma." 



