The reports of the Investigators of the Higher Certificate Examinations have 
not yet been published. 
J Base passage in the report to which grave exception must be taken is as 
ollows :— 
“Very few of the candidates offer this subject (Natural History), and it 
seems very doubtful whether it is worth while to maintain it as qualifying 
for a Pass with Credit in Science. The principles of Biological Science can 
be better illustrated by means of Botany, especially as Physiology occupies a 
far more important place in this subject than in Zoology, which does not 
readily lend itself to experimental treatment.’ 
The Science of Biology, as the word is now used, is the Science that deals 
with living things, animal and vegetable, and it is difficult to understand how 
the principles of the subject can be taught, even in the most elementary stages, 
in a course of study from which the problems and features of animal life are 
entirely excluded. The study of Botany can afford illustrations of the life of 
plants, but it cannot give correct or reasonable instruction in the principles of 
Biology. If a student has attended such a course of Botany, is it possible 
that he could understand anything that could reasonably be called the first 
_ principles of Biology, when he is entirely ignorant of the structure and functions 
_ of the heart, the nervous system, the sense organs, the locomotor organs, and 
+ the reproductive organs of animals? Many of us who have had long experience 
_ of the teaching of Biology are convinced that the conceptions of the principles 
_ of Biology that such a student gains are both incorrect and misleading. From 
the standpoint of first principles, the whole life of a green plant, from its 
dependence on so highly specialised a substance as chlorophyll, is rather an 
anomaly than a self-sufficient illustration. There may be some truth in the 
statement that Zoology does not lend itself so readily to experimental treatment 
: ON ZOOLOGY ORGANISATION. 265 
3 
as Botany; but even in this respect a properly trained teacher can devise 
valuable experiments upon animals which do not involve injury to or death 
of the subjects of the experiments. It is perfectly simple, for example, to 
demonstrate colour changes in the skin of living frogs, by comparing two 
specimens, one of which has been kept in a dark cupboard and the other in 
the sunlight for half an hour, to show the reactions of different kinds of 
protozoa to light and heat, to demonstrate the beating of the heart of a daphnia, 
or the circulation of the blood in a tadpole or a worm under the microscope, 
without injuring it or sacrificing its life. 
It is equally feasible to apply exact, if qualitative, experimentation to 
the study of the many respiratory and environmental adaptations of aquatic 
animals such as crabs, molluscs, and many insects and their larve. There 
are, in fact, many ways in which Zoology even at this stage can be treated 
as an experimental science with the simplest apparatus. 
But it is not in this aspect of the subject that its chief educational training 
jes. Its place in the curriculum is advocated because it is pre-eminently 
the subject that can be used with effect for education in careful observation 
d comparison and inference. 
At the very beginning of school life it has the advantage that nearly all 
And to the older student, what science can present problems of such 
enthralling interest? Which can give so furiously to think as Zoology, with 
ts various theories of evolution and heredity, bearing as these do alike on 
the past and the future of man, with the universal drama of sex, the almost 
credible intricacy of the ‘web of life,’ and, above all, the picture of the 
living organism, most delicate and fragile of living objects, standing for ever 
poised upon the brink of destruction, yet, thanks to the life that is in it, 
i na fate? Surely this is a subject to be taught if intellectual stimulus 
be needed. : 
_ In the hands of competent teachers the subject is one which can be used 
with great advantage, not only as a training for the faculties, but also as a 
1921 
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