1897] NOTES AND COMMENTS 219 
THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN TEACHING BIOLOGY 
Pror. MIALL, in his Presidential Address, not only emphasises 
the importance of the study of living animals in a manner that will 
scarcely bear abstracting, he also adds another important sugges- 
tion, that too little attention is bestowed by biological teachers upon 
the historical development of the subject. Many students attend 
the lectures and demonstrations simply because they are compelled 
to do so by the college curriculum or by the exigencies of a certifi- 
cate. Those who happen to have no preliminary inclination to the 
subject thus find many of the statements of bare facts dull, unin- 
teresting, and useless for mental discipline. Suppose that that well- 
worn topic, the Alternation of Generations, is being treated. As 
Prof, Miall remarks, “the lecturer defines his terms and quotes 
his examples; we have Salpa and Aurelia and the Fern, and as 
many more as time allows. Hew can he expect to interest any- 
body in a featureless narrative, which gives no fact with its natural 
circumstances, but mashes the whole into pemmican? What 
student goes away with the thought that it would be good and 
pleasant to add to the heap of known facts? The heap seems need- 
lessly big already. And yet every item in that dull mass was once 
deeply interesting, moving all naturalists and many who were not 
naturalists to wonder and delight. The Alternation of Generations 
worked upon men’s minds in its day like Swammerdam’s discovery 
of the butterfly within the caterpillar, or Trembley’s discovery of 
the budding Hydra, which when cut in two made two new animals, 
or Bonnet’s discovery that an Aphis could bring forth living young 
without having ever met another individual of its own species. 
All these wonders of nature have now been condensed into glue. 
But we can at any time rouse in the minds of our students some 
little of the old interest, if we will only tell the tale as it was told 
for the first time.” 
Of course, there are many practical difficulties in carrying out 
this suggestion. It entails much reading of ancient literature, 
which the ordinary teacher rarely sees. It trespasses upon the 
allotted lecture hours, already too short for the material to be 
treated. At the same time, if it succeeded in infusing a little 
more philosophy into our medical students and others, who are 
too apt to look upon the preliminary biological course as drudgery, 
it would well repay the additional labour involved in preparation, 
THE TIMES ON ARCHAEOLOGY 
THE foregoing matters are of more or less professional interest. So 
also are the geological questions—the pre-Cambrian problems of 
