The Study of Embryology

Abstract

THE publication of this volume supplies a long-felt want. Many will remember the pleasure with which the first appearance of an English volume solely devoted to embryology was hailed. But there was a good deal of the “lively anticipation of future favours” in the gratitude with which the public received Part 1. of the “Embryology” by Foster and Balfour. The first edition of this text-book contained, it will be remembered, a clearly written, well illustrated account of what was then known of the embryology of the chick. Although the details were far in advance of anything previously published on the subject in our language, yet the explanations were so clear and the style so lucid that the book was in every way suitable for the beginner. The public was informed, in the introduction, that the work was to be extended so that it would become a text-book of general embryology. Although this promise was more than fulfilled on the appearance of Balfour's classical work, the young morphologist was to a certain extent the loser by the immense benefit thus conferred upon the more advanced student. The second edition of the former book brought the account of the development of the chick up to date, and a comparatively short description of the essential features of embryological development in Mammalia was added, but the work still remains an enlarged Part 1. But in the meantime the immense and ever-increasing development of invertebrate embryology, and the magnitude of the theoretical considerations raised by its advance, rendered it more necessary than ever that the beginner should be in possession of some introduction to this part of the subject; and that the student whom time and opportunity prevented from mastering Balfour's great work should, nevertheless, be permitted to gain some insight into the subject as a whole.

An Introduction to the Study of Embryology.

By Prof. A. C. Haddon (London: C. Griffin and Co., 1887.)