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NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 



A Student's Text- Book of Zoology. By Adam Sedgwick, M.A., 

 F.R.S. Vol.11. Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd. 



The first volume of this work was noticed in ' The Zoologist ' 

 for 1898. The second has just been published, and a third 

 volume — dealing with the Tunicata, Enteropneusta, Echinoder- 

 mata, and Arthropoda — is in the press ; the present volume 

 being devoted to the Chordata — Pisces, Amphibia, Reptilia, Aves, 

 and Mammalia. 



It would be beyond our scope to give a resume of the classifi- 

 cation adopted in this cautious and excellent text-book, or to 

 deal with the anatomical and morphological details which form 

 its substance ; these are for its reader — the biological student, 

 an individual who is now provided with material that would 

 have gladdened the heart and differently influenced the career 

 of many young zoologists in the past generation, when an 

 evolutionary attitude was not considered to be always safe in 

 biological treatises. Now it is no longer a question as to whether 

 a writer in this field is an evolutionist, but rather in what 

 biological grade he works, or to what evolutionary plane he has 

 attained. Mr. Sedgwick, in his preface, asks for lenient judg- 

 ment if in some pages he has " seemed to take up an unduly 

 critical position with regard to views widely prevalent at the 

 present time on some aspects of organic evolution," a position 

 in which many others find themselves, who, holding the evolu- 

 tionary faith or conception, do not feel compelled to accept 

 every proposed interpretation, nor do they hold that such 

 non-acceptance is biological heresy. We often seem to have 

 reached the stage of enjoying a new theory as much as the 

 enunciation of an hitherto unknown fact, and though theo- 

 sophists sometimes tell us we are reincarnate decadent Bomans, 

 Zool. 4th ser. vol. IX., May, 1905. q 



