124 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
but should give basal knowledge of value in the subsequent years of 
study; and, moreover, if the student can see that his zoological work 
bears on his later studies he will take much more interest in it. It is 
important, therefore, that the pomts of contact of his present with his 
future work should be successively indicated. 
The details of the course of zoology for the first-year medical student 
will vary in the hands of different teachers, and it is well that they 
should be to some extent elastic.. In a minimum course will be included 
the consideration of two or three protozoa, a ccelenterate, an annelid, 
an arthropod—and especially the features in which it presents advance 
as compared with an annelid, an elasmobranch fish, and a frog, the 
primitive features of the fish being emphasised, and the chief systems of 
organs of both vertebrates compared with each other and with those of 
amammal. The functions of the principal organs of all these examples 
will be dealt with so far as they can be understood from the account of 
structure—this latter being sufficient to illustrate the principles involved, 
care being taken not to over-elaborate structural details. Man’s place 
in nature should be considered either in the course of zoology or in 
that of anatomy. Other opportunities occur during the course in 
anatomy, and still more in physiology, for reference to the conditions 
in lower animals, and if more use could be made of these opportunities 
the linkage between zoology and the second-year subjects would become 
much more perfect, and would help in doing away with the water- 
tight compartments into which the average student considers his early 
medical education to be divided. 
The course in zoology should be planned so as to give the student a 
wide outlook on structure and function, adaptation and environment, 
some knowledge of the germ-cells and their maturation, of fertilisation, 
growth, regulation, regeneration, decline and death, and an introduction 
to evolution, heredity and genetics—in general, it should aim at afford- 
ing a broad conception of the activities and modifications of the organism 
as a living thing, and should educate the student to manipulate, to 
observe and record, and to exercise his judgment in matters of inference 
and of theory. 
While some reference may be made in the first-year course to insects 
and parasitic organisms to indicate the relationship between zoology and 
pathology and public health, it has seemed to me for some years that 
the real instruction in entomology and parasitology should be given in 
the later part of the third or early in the fourth year along with the 
course in bactericlogy. The first-year student, although keenly inter- 
ested in the direct applications of zoology to medicine, is not competent 
at that early stage of his career to obtain full advantage from studies 
on parasites. In most Universities a certain amount of time is already 
set aside in the third year for the study of protozoa, and of helminthes 
and their eggs, and I have suggested to some of my colleagues in Edin- 
burgh that the teaching on these subjects in the first and in the third 
year should be brought together in the latter year and remodelled to 
form a short course of lectures, demonstrations, and practical work to 
cover the essentials required for general practice in this country. By 
this time the student is much better fitted to appreciate the bearings of 
