Handbuch der Zoologie

Abstract

THE second volume of this work appeared in 1863, the first part of the first volume in 1868, and at length the book is completed by the appearance of the second part of the first volume in 1875. It is somewhat late in the day to review the earlier parts of the undertaking, but looking at it as a whole, we do not hesitate to say that the “Handbuch” in which Prof. Carus has had the chief share (the Arthropods alone are treated by Prof. Gerstaecker) is eminently useful and worthy of his high reputation for perspicacity and practical good sense. There are few men to whom zoologists both in this country as well as in his fatherland, are so much indebted for solid help in their labours of research or of instruction as to Prof. Victor Carus, Who has not felt grateful to him for the “Bibliotheca Zoologica,” which bears his name? What naturalist of this generation has not consulted, as a storehouse of inexhaustible treasure, the “Icones Zootomicæ,” which, after twenty years, continues to hold its place as the most valuable pictorial treatise on the Invertebrata which we possess? Prof. Carus has further served his countrymen by acting as the competent translator of Mr. Darwin's works—and to us he has lent timely aid by discharging for two years the duties of the Edinburgh chair of Natural History in the absence of Prof. Wyville Thomson. In an enumeration of the labours of this kind for which zoologists have to thank Prof. Carus, we must not omit the volume on the history of Zoology—published in the Munich series of histories of the sciences—a work which is full of the most interesting details of the early beginnings and strange developments of the study of animal form.

Handbuch der Zoologie.

Von Jul. Victor Carus C. E. A. Gerstaecker. (Leipzig: Engelmann.)