( 33 ) 



NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 



Zoology : an Elementary Text-Book. By A. E. Shipley, M.A., 

 &c, and E. W. MacBride, M.A., &c. Cambridge: at the 

 University Press. 



" We have tried in the following book to write an elementary 

 treatise on Zoology which could readilybe understood by a student 

 who had no previous knowledge of the subject." This is the 

 opening sentence of the preface. The word Zoology " denotes 

 the science which concerns itself with animals, endeavouring to 

 find out what they are, and how they came into being," is the 

 definition given in the introduction. These two statements may 

 be taken as admirable texts to a volume which should be in the 

 hands of those many naturalists who are not in the strict sense 

 zoologists. 



After discussing the " fundamental " difference between ani- 

 mals and plants, which after all is perhaps less fundamental than 

 relative, we come to a most pregnant sentence, which will well 

 bear repetition and remembrance : " Since we can never learn 

 much about the consciousness of beings with whom we cannot 

 speak, zoologists content themselves with looking at animals 

 entirely from the outside, without enquiring as to whether or no 

 they are conscious." We believe that a communication with 

 animal life will be the great zoological discovery of the future, 

 though at present scarcely a single experiment is being made to 

 aid a work which, like meteorology, can only make a start on the 

 results of experiments and observations continuously made, and 

 frequently verified. The very statement of our disability through 

 this cause to really understand other animal life than our own is 

 at once a mark of progress. 



In reading these pages one cannot but appreciate the loss to 



bionomics that accrues by the neglect of observations on many 



lower forms of life. If we except the Phylum Arthropoda and 



the higher vertebrates, we shall find this volume describing 



Bool. 4th ser. vol. VI., January, 1902. d 



