44 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
AN ANALYSIS OF SOME TEXT BOOKS IN ZOOLOGY 
ELLIOT R. DOWNING, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 
In a questionaire which was sent out something over a year 
ago to a number of the high schools of the middle west, an 
inquiry was made as to the title of the text book, which is be- 
ing used in the high school course in zoology. Returns indi- 
cate that there is a surprising variation in the book adopted. 
It is true that one text was used predominantly, yet a great 
many were found in use and several of these were texts of the 
older type, dating their publication back forty years or more. 
This suggested an attempt at an analysis of the various texts 
in zoology. With the aid of a class of graduate students, some 
thirty text books were analyzed. It was evident as the analy- 
sis proceeded and the results were tabulated, that the text- 
books in use during the history of zoology instruction in this 
country indicate in the main, the changing conceptions of rela- 
tive values in the instruction. It would be beyond the limits of 
this paper to undertake to present all of the data, so certain 
texts are selected from the lot analyzed which will be repre- 
sentative of the various types of zoology instruction which 
have been in vogue, and which will show, in a measure at 
least, the tendencies which are now at work in the instruction 
in high school zoology. 
These figures will in no case foot up a total of 100 per cent 
because the topics selected are only representative ones from 
the group of some twenty-five topics that make up the com- 
plete analysis of the several books. The methods of getting at 
the figures were as follows : The book was read, and an esti- 
mate made, of the number of pages or fractions of a page (es- 
timated in lines) devoted to each subject. Frequently, there- 
fore, several subjects might be considered upon the same page, 
and these subjects might re-appear at many points in the 
course of the book. A summation of the pages and fractions 
of a page was finally made for each of the several topics and 
the percentage was computed which this total made of the en- 
tire number of pages of the book. 
Certain tendencies are very apparent from this analysis. The 
oldest text evidently approaches the subject of zoology from 
the physiological point of view. There ensues then what may 
be termed the natural history point of View, stressing external 
features and habits. Then comes a period represented by 
Orton and particularly by Colton in which the morpohology 
