Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 2 (1898).djvu/311

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
279

Space will only allow us to draw further attention to two really zoological treatises (XIV. and XV.)—on Whales past and present—which it should be noted are to be found in this volume; to some well-known anthropological addresses; and to biographical sketches of Rolleston, Owen, Huxley, and Darwin.


A Student's Text-Book of Zoology. By Adam Sedgwick, M.A., F.R.S. Vol. I. Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Limited.

The appearance of this work is but little subsequent to the Text-Book of Parker and Haswell, recently noticed in these pages (ante, p. 132). Its aim is distinctly stated—"to place before English students of Zoology a treatise in which the subject was dealt with on the lines followed with so much advantage by Claus and his predecessors in their works on Zoology." This volume—the first—deals with the whole of the animal kingdom except the Arthropoda, the Echinodermata, and the Chordata, which will form the subject of the second volume. A third may probably be issued devoted generally to the facts and principles of Zoology.

Books of this character can be reviewed in two ways: either criticised by a specialist for some weakness or novelty in his own particular study to which he may have devoted his life; or brought to the notice of the general zoologist or naturalist, as a comprehensive whole, where the latest knowledge may be sought by the specialist on the general subject, and where the general student may expect to find special information on the concrete subject. The labour and anxiety to produce a modern text-book is now necessarily enormous, and a feeling of great responsibility arises in writing a notice of a work which, if it fulfils its purpose, must prove a technical encyclopædia to zoologists who study only the histories of the mature life of animals, and who seek instruction in deeper biological principles. Our pages, we need hardly remind the reader, are devoted to the former, but we all frequently need an authoritative guide to the latter. It is thus a mistake to altogether appreciate these works as students' textbooks; they cover a wider area, and are, in the true sense, works of reference.

Prof. Sedgwick is an advocate of a preliminary knowledge of Zoology being acquired by the study of types, a method largely