PREFACE 



This book, an introduction to the study of animals and their 

 life, is intended for use in grammar schools and in those high 

 schools which are not equipped with laboratories or which do not 

 care to undertake the study of zoology by having the pupil dis- 

 sect a series of types or examples. For high schools prepared 

 to take up this college method of zoological study the author's 

 Elementary Zoology is intended. In preparing a text-book for 

 the guidance of teachers and pupils in high schools without 

 laboratory equipment and in grammar schools and classes of 

 younger pupils, the author has believed it better to write a new 

 book, rather than to shorten and ' ' simplify ' ' the text intended 

 for larger high schools and older pupils. He has believed it 

 better to make the life-history and habits of familiar animals 

 the basis for a beginning study of zoology by young pupils rather 

 than to make the study of structure and classification such a 

 basis. But this is not a reading book, or nature-study story 

 book. It is a guide and outline for constant, specific personal 

 work in observation, and answering questions by means of this 

 observation, on the part of the pupils, and only such telling of 

 facts is included as seems necessary to make significant and 

 coherent and related the self-made discoveries of the pupils. 



The actual method of use of the book will be obvious to any 

 teacher into whose hands it may fall. The succession of chap- 

 ters is one that seems natural and useful to the author; for any 

 teacher it will be, of course, a simple matter to modify and re- 

 arrange the course of work as outlined. In fact the opportu- 

 nities for obtaining material for study offered by the situation of 

 the school, as, for example, whether on the seashore or in the 

 interior near a lake or river, or on the dry plains, and the rela- 

 tion of the school terms to the seasons of the year, and other 

 special and varying conditions, will dictate in large measure the 



