-10.06 Recent Literature. 
JORDAN’S MANUAL OF THE VERTEBRATES.'—In this, the latest 
‘edition of this well-known work, Dr. Jordan has completely revised 
the text, turning it end for end, condensing and rewriting almost 
every page, as well as increasing its scope by admitting to its pages 
the littoral forms of the Atlantic Coast of the United States. The 
work is apparently fairly well done both by author and manu- 
facturer, though we might criticise the classification adopted 
in some cases, or pick out here and there errors of anatomical 
statement, for Dr. Jordan is confessedly no anatomist, but takes 
his structural knowledge at second hand. Books of this kind 
constitute the most popular and useful introductions to the sciences 
of which they treat, but it must be remembered that they constitute 
introductions only. 
e fault lies not in the keys but in the use to which they are 
put. They serve the poor teacher, and enable him to do the poor- 
est kind of work with the least possible expenditure of brain force. 
All he has to do is to give the student a bird or a fish and one of 
` these manuals and the work is done. The poor student, imagining 
that he is deriving mental discipline by the operation, but not 
clearly realising where it comes in, struggles with the inoffensive 
fish or fowl down through pages of “keys,” until at last he cap- 
tures a Latin name which seems to fit it. As has been wittily said, 
“ it is like tracking a woodchuck to a hole, when you get there all 
you have isa hole.” ‘Yet this process is daily going on in hun- 
dreds of our high-schools and scores of our colleges to-day. In 
many an institution which rejoices under the name of University 
the biological „students never learn a single anatomical fact, never 
hear a single embryological statement; their whole knowledge o 
the varied forms of life around them consists in having learned the 
names of a few dozen vertebrates and flowering plants. While the 
botanical manuals of Wood and Gray are largely responsible for the 
wide taste for botany in the United States, they are too often 
regarded as the summum bonum of the science by the teacher. 
True zoologists must be on the alert or similar works upon the 
animal side will be used in the same superficial way. | 
-1 Jordan, David Starr. A manual of the Vertebrate Animals of the 
Northern United States, including the district north and east of the 
‘Ozark Mountains, south of the Laurentian Hills, north of the southern 
boundary of Virginia, and east of the Missouri River. Inclusive © 
Marine species. Fifth edition. Chicago, 1888. 
