Introduction to Zoology: A Guide to the Study of Animals for the Use of Secondary Schools (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Introduction to Zoology: A Guide to the Study of Animals for the Use of Secondary Schools

The general plan of this text-book is at the same time both old and new. Old, because it attempts to restore the old-time instruction in Natural History; new, because "Natural History" is not to-day what it was a generation ago. The treatment will seem new also in contrast with modern text-books of zoology, since they are devoted primarily to comparative anatomy, a field upon which we lay little stress.

This departure is the outcome of a conviction that the needs of the secondary student are not best met by a course in comparative anatomy. That conviction is not altered by the circumstance that anatomy is fundamental for advanced work in zoology and physiology, for only a sixth of the secondary students go to college, and probably less than four percent of them continue their zoological work there. The vast majority of secondary students, then, are not to be zoologists, but rather men of affairs. What the ordinary citizen needs is an acquaintance with the common animals that may be the companions of his country walks, and that may even stray into Wall Street, Dearborn Street, or Commonwealth Avenue. He wants to know where else over the world the common animals of his State are to be found and, as a legislator or as a taxpayer, he wants to know how animals affect man.

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