Abstract
IF Germans wonder, not without reason, who buy our manuals of microscopic mounting, Englishmen may equally wonder for whom such books as Dr. Thomé's are written. We have technical treatises on special branches of zoology, and we have popular natural history books, but a manual like this would find a poor sale in England. It is a school manual, and its existence is explained by the introduction of zoology to some extent into the curriculum of the German gymnasia and much more into that of the Realschule, which more or less correspond to the “modern side” of our public schools, or may be described as answering in intention, though of course immeasurably superior in performance, to English “coinmercial schools.” Whether zoology ought to form a regular part of school work, even where room is made by giving up Greek altogether and Latin more or less, is an important question. As a part of education in the proper sense of the word, it is so inferior in exactness, in conciseness, in facility of demonstration, and convenience for observation and experiment to such rivals as botany, physics, and even chemistry, that its claims may practically be ignored. Moreover, looking at school work from another point of view, it is obvious that any scheme of utilitarian instruction which is good for muchmust include ignorance of the greaterpart of human knowledge, in order to provide for acquaintance with the rest; and the first addition to the indispensable elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic would probably be claimed for geography, political economy, or the rudiments of hygiene, as more useful blanches of knowledge than zoology. A boy with a bent for natural history would gain far more good from reading the bits of zoology in such books as the “Voyage of the Beagle,”the “Malay Archipelago,” or “Kosmos,” and by collecting bird's eggs or butterflies, than h would by painfully wading through the details of Dr. Thomé's closely printed pages. And when zoology is taken up as a serious study by older students, most teachers will agree that the best plan is for them to begin by a careful study of a particular branch of the subject, with the help of such a handbook as Flowers' “Osteology of the Mammalia.”
Lehrbuch der Zoologie.
Von Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé; Pp. 416. (Brunswick: 1872.)
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S., P. Thome's Lehrbuch Der Zoologie . Nature 8, 198 (1873). https://doi.org/10.1038/008198a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/008198a0