INSECTIVOROUS ANIMALS 289 



passed around and examined without danger of offending tlie most 

 fastidious. Tlie idea that warts are caused by handling toads is 

 ancient myth without foundation in fact. 



The Biological Type. — Types of animal forms and struc- 

 tures have long been used in college courses in biology 

 and belong properly to this grade of advanced instruction. 

 The many attempts to introduce these same "types" into 

 more and more elementary work have seemed to me pre- 

 mature and ill advised. Before such studies are undertaken 

 the children need a foundation of living interests in the 

 animal life about them, and I have advanced this study 

 as a new kind of type, adapted to elementary education. 

 I have called it the biological type. In less technical 

 words it may be called the life type, or life-story type, 

 for the study of an animal species. We have come of 

 late to appreciate the necessity of studying animals and 

 plants with children "as wholes," but this too often has 

 been interpreted to include little more than their forms 

 and structures, which to children are dead and without 

 interest. By this life type I mean the activities, the work 

 of a species in its wholeness, — -the active relations of the 

 animal to the life about it and especially to man. This is 

 the side of fundamental, large, and universal interests in 

 the life about us. 



hundreds of species to this list, if they Icnew the species. Still this, of 

 course, would not show what might be termed the natural feeding habits 

 of the toad. But the toad's stomach is a straight sac extending from the 

 mouth, where it is very wide, back almost to the end of the body. It is 

 easily everted, and by gently inserting a wire loop (a hairpin does very 

 well) the whole stomach contents may be drawn out without the least injury 

 to the animal. I do not, however, give this as a method to be used, but 

 merely as a suggestion, by which the animal's Ufe may be saved when it is 

 desired to make such examinations. 



