PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 



This work has grown out of our needs as instructors of students pre- 

 paring for practical work in Human, Veterinary, or Comparative Anatomy. 

 Most of it has been employed in the anatomical laboratory of Cornell Uni- 

 versity for from one to four years, and we have been led to believe that it 

 may prove useful elsewhere. 



Some of our laboratory students aim to be professional naturalists, agri- 

 culturists, or Tcterinarians, but most of them intend to study Medicine or to 

 teach Physiology with other branches in schools and colleges. The latter 

 desire to gain a personal acquaintance with the organs whose functions they 

 are to discuss, and the former require, in addition, a familiarity with 

 anatomical methods and literature; few of them have had any practical 

 training in Biology. 



The guides to vertebrate dissection by Straus-Durckheim, Morrell, Eol- 

 leston, Krause, Huxley and Martin, Foster and Langley, Bernard, Martin 

 and Moale, and Mojsisovics, present many admirable features, but four of 

 them are in French or German, and none have fully answered our require- 

 ments. 



Of the works above named, several imply that either the frog or the 

 human body has been previously dissected ; hence, presumably, the brevity 

 of the directions, the lack of descriptions of instruments and methods, and 

 the fewness or absence of illustrations. They are based upon the frog, 

 turtle, dog, rat or rabbit, or on animals in general, and the ordinary anthro- 

 potomical terms of description, upper, lower, etc., are almost uniformly 

 employed. Some dwell only upon points of physiological importance, and 

 in nearly all the references to other publications are few and general. 



