PRIlFACE 



At the present day education is not complete without 

 definite courses of nature study. We are hving in an age 

 of strenuous business Hfe and activity, where the best 

 equipped students along the various lines secure the best 

 positions. Time was when zoology, botany, and kindred 

 nature studies were classed with music and the so-called 

 dead languages, and were taken up as incidentals or were 

 employed in *' mind training"; but to-day there are a 

 thousand branches of trade and commerce which require 

 knowledge that can be obtained only through nature 

 study. 



It is not necessary that the student, unless he intends 

 to be a teacher of science or a professional naturalist, 

 should be able to pass examinations in the abstruse clas- 

 sification of animals or delve into difficult anatomical 

 studies. What the average student needs is a broad and 

 general idea of animal life, its great divisions, and notably 

 the relationship of the lower animals to man in an eco- 

 nomic sense, the geographical distribution of animals, etc. 

 It is vastly more important for the coming lumber mer- 

 chant to know the relationship which forests bear to the 

 water supply, and to have a general idea of forestry and 

 the trees which make forests, than to be able to recite a 

 long formula of classification or analysis, of value only to 

 the advanced student or specialist. The future merchant 

 who is to deal in alpaca, leather, dye, skins, hair, bone 

 products, shell, pearl, lac, animal food products, ivory, 

 whalebone, guano, feathers, and countless other articles 



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