648 
the issue, namely, M. has a cousin defective 
in thesamesense. This cousin is the daughter 
of a paternal aunt whose husband, from quite 
another family, is “ smell-blind.” 
“After making inquiries,” M. writes,” 
among people I know to be from my former 
place of residence, I came to the conclusion 
that that locality inbreeds this defect so that 
quite a number are afflicted with it.” 
This, in case the trait is sex-linked, is ex- 
actly the condition necessary to explain the 
relatively large number of duplex females 
herein recorded. , 
Whatever may or may not be true, the trait 
has reappeared in one collateral and two di- 
rect generations. This is sufficiently frequent 
to warrant the assumption that “ smell-blind- 
ness” is heritable, and, from its behavior in 
this pedigree, it should not be very surprising 
if further evidence were to place it in the list 
of sex-linked characters. 
Orro GLASER 
DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY, 
AMHERST COLLEGE 
BIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES IN THE ZOOLOGY 
COURSE 
In an article entitled “Botany after the 
War,” Professor Bradley M. Davis discusses 
the changes which a period of war adjustment 
is likely to bring to the teaching of botany in 
introductory courses. It is not necessary to 
read between the lines to detect that Pro- 
fessor Davis will welcome the changes that he 
anticipates. His interest is chiefly directed to 
the relegation of morphology—especially the 
morphology of types—to a less commanding 
position then it now enjoys. His general 
thesis is well embodied in his closing interro- 
gation whether the first course will not “ come 
more and more strongly to stand out as one 
that attempts nothing more than the ground- 
ing of fundamental principles and a selection 
of information with rather definite reference 
to its general and practical interests, or its 
broad philosophical bearing.” 
The writer has not followed the discussion 
1Sornce, N. 8., Vol. 48, November 22, 1918, 
pp. 514-515. 
SCIENCE 
\ 
[N. S. Von. XLVIII. No. 1262 
in the New Phytologist, but the reference to it 
made in the cited article leads him to infer 
that the ideal course in botany has been real- 
ized in few, perhaps none, of our institutions. 
Such an inference with regard to botany seems 
not at all unnatural to one who is acquainted 
with the situation in the teaching of its sister 
science zoology. In the latter subject the type 
course has long been the dominant one, al- 
most the exclusive one, an inheritance from 
the time when zoology was a purely morpho- 
logical science. Several books, it is true, have 
been in recent years described by their authors 
as the product of a revolt against the type 
course; but they mostly contain internal evi- 
dence that the laboratory courses which they 
accompany in the authors’ own laboratories 
still consist largely of the dissection of types. 
While these teachers recognize that funda- 
mental principles, rather than a knowledge of 
animal types, is the desirable acquisition of 
the beginning student, they have not had the 
courage to make that acquisition possible in 
the laboratory as well as in the recitation and 
lecture. 
There is no fundamental reason why the 
work of the laboratory may not be grouped ex- 
elusively around general principles instead of 
around phyla and classes. Why allow demon- 
stration of the tenets of the cell doctrine to be 
picked up piece-meal in several courses when 
a brief exercise on a number of unrelated 
organisms accomplishes the same purpose more 
completely at the outset? The simpler activi- 
ties of protoplasm may be studied even by 
beginners, by introducing at one time organ- 
isms from widely different groups. ‘The first- 
hand study of the principles of ecology does 
not require a knowledge of large animal asso- 
ciations, but can be satisfactorily based upon 
two or three forms taken from different phyla; 
and it is seldom necessary to know regarding 
any one of these animals more than a small 
fraction of the anatomical facts which a type 
course would include, to explain for the begin- 
ner the relation of that animal to its habitat. 
In the type course homology must be taught 
very incidentally in almost arbitrary connec- - 
tion with some one form, or must wait until 
