INTRODUCTION J 



ineffective and that the evidence which had originally suggested their 

 use was improperly controlled. There is a time in the development of 

 any new treatment when the medical profession is not only morally 

 justified, but really morally required, to do carefully controlled tests on 

 human beings to be sure that the new treatment is better than the former 

 one. 



In medical testing it is not sufficient simply to give a treatment to 

 one group of patients and not to give it to another, for it is widely known 

 that there is a strong psychologic effect in simply giving a treatment of 

 any sort. For example, a group of students in a large western university 

 served as subjects for a test of the hypothesis that daily doses of extra 

 amounts of vitamin C might help prevent colds. This giew- out of the 

 observation that people who drink lots of fruit juices seem to have fewer 

 colds. The group receiving the vitamin C showed a 65 per cent reduc- 

 tion in the number of colds contracted during the winter in which they 

 received treatment as compared to the previous winter when they had 

 no treatment. There were enough students in the group (208) to make 

 this result statistically significant. In the absence of controls, one would 

 have been led to the conclusion that vitamin C does help prevent colds. 

 A second group of students were given "placebos," pills identical in size, 

 shape, color and taste to the vitamin C pills but without any vitamin C. 

 The students were not told who was getting vitamin C and who was 

 not; they only knew they were getting pills that might help prevent colds. 

 The group getting the placebos reported that they had a 63 per cent 

 reduction in the number of colds! This controlled experiment thus shows 

 that vitamin C had nothing to do with the decrease in the number of 

 colds and that the reductions reported in both groups were either psy- 

 chologic effects or simply the result of a lesser amount of cold virus on 

 the campus that year. There have been reports that other substances, 

 called flavonoids, present in fruit juices may have some effect in pro- 

 tecting against the common cold. Comparable carefully controlled ex- 

 periments are needed to substantiate this report. 



3. History of Zoology * 



Man's interest in animals is probably somewhat older than the hu- 

 man race, for the ape-men and men-apes that preceded him in evolution 

 undoubtedly learned at an early time which animals were dangerous, 

 which could be hunted for food, clothing or shelter, where these were 

 to be found, and so on. Some of prehistoric man's impressions of the 

 contemporary animals have survived in the cave paintings of France 

 and Spain (Fig. 1.1). Some animals were regarded as good or evil spirits. 

 Later man decorated pottery, tools, cloth and other objects with animal 

 figures. 



The early Egyptians had a wealth of knowledge about animals and 

 had domesticated cattle, sheep, pigs, cats, geese and ducks. The Greek 

 philosophers of the fifth and sixth centuries b.c, Anaximander, Xenoph- 

 anes, Empedocles and others, speculated on the origin of the animals 

 of the earth. One of the earliest classifications of animals is found in a 



