430 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIII. No. 846 



one of the most deadly and most painful of 

 diseases may be conquered. The Society for 

 the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ought 

 to bend all of its energies to stopping the men 

 of science from making any use of these mice. 

 If they do not successfully interfere, it is 

 likely that cancer may be conquered as 

 thoroughly as diphtheria, which has been re- 

 duced from one of the most destructive 

 scourges of children to a point where, if the 

 antitoxin is taken in the first twenty-four 

 hours, the death-rate is only about one and a 

 half per cent. 



A fight is going on against the gipsy moth, 

 the hookworm, and other well-meaning in- 

 habitants of the globe. We suggest that bills 

 be introduced by humanitarians into all the 

 legislatures to protect these guiltless creatures. 

 Eats are unpopular just now because of the 

 fact that they carry the bubonic plague and 

 other diseases. There ought to be organized 

 at once a society for the protection of rodents. 



The more reasonable these bills may be 

 made to sound, the more chance there is that 

 they may accomplish some unspeakably fatal 

 blow against the human race. There are laws 

 now in plenty forbidding cruelty. The great 

 institutions which are specially aimed at by 

 the cranks, like the Rockefeller Institute, are 

 in the hands of men who are spending their 

 lives in the cause of solid and real kindness. 

 Shall we take away from splendidly equipped 

 experts of devoted character the right to 

 judge what experiments are necessary, and 

 put the question into the hands of some fool 

 committee made up of persons in whom 

 hysterical excitement takes the place of 

 knowledge ? — Collier's. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 



ELEMENTARY BIOLOGIES 



Biology is unique among her sister sciences 

 in the wealth of variation in the methods of 

 presenting the subject to beginners. It has 

 been truly said that there are as many meth- 

 ods in this work as there are men conducting 

 it. In the minds of many, this is as it should 

 be, for there are requirements for one which 



are not for another. The technical school 

 emphasizes certain things which will not form 

 a part of the course given in the classical col- 

 lege. The material or content varies. 



It is a question in the writer's mind as to 

 how much the method of presentation should 

 vary in the several conditions. The following 

 well-marked methods of teaching beginning 

 biology are recognizable: (1) Biology as an 

 integer, not resolved into its components, zool- 

 ogy and botany. As subdivisions of this cate- 

 gory, one finds: (a) The type method, intro- 

 duced into this country when Martin, in 

 1868, adapted Huxley's "Biology" to the 

 students entering American colleges at that 

 time. The evolutionary chain was empha- 

 sized and morphology was predominant. (&) 

 The two-type method, which Sedgwick and 

 Wilson used in their text, one animal and one 

 plant being selected and studied exhaustively, 

 others being presented as comparisons. The 

 functions of living matter were considered 

 equally with the morphological features, (c) 

 A method, not especially new but well marked 

 in the " General Biology " of Needham,' where 

 the principles are emphasized, illustrations 

 being selected towards that end and morphol- 

 ogy reduced to a minimum; types as such 

 are scarcely recognizable. With the second 

 great division (2), the science is resolved into 

 its components, zoology and botany, but we 

 may distinguish here, as before, well-marked 

 subdivisions, (a) where the biological aspect 

 is maintained and (&) where the work is pre- 

 sented as purely botany and purely zoology, 

 with no reference to the common ground be- 

 tween them. 



There have been published recently, in this 

 country and abroad, several books whose pur- 

 pose is to fill one of the fields given above. 

 Kirkaldy and Drummond^ have followed la in 

 giving a discussion of isolated types, with 

 little intercommunicating cement. If biology 

 is a science, as chemistry is a science and 

 physics is a science, having definite content 

 and definite principles, one would never de- 



' Comstock Publishing Co., Ithaca, 1910. 

 ^ " An Introduction to the Study of Biology," 

 Oxford, 1909. 



