Outlines of Zoology

Abstract

GENERAL.—The above-named volume of 604 pages small octavo, the latest of Pentland's “Students' Manuals,” is divided into twenty-five chapters, with an introduction and a well-constructed index. By way of illustration, there are interleaved two-and-thirty sheets of diagrammatic sketches. It is difficult to find upon these any dozen figures which adequately represent anything in nature, and the majority of the “diagrams” are the rudest of rude sketch maps. Archetypes are well to the fore with their misrepresentations and evil influences, and such illustrations as those of the “unsegmented worm,” the “ spinal canal” figure of Plate 22, and others akin to them, are meaningless atrocities, conveying absolutely no idea to the mind. The Peripatus series are very suggestive; they are three in number—namely, one (bad) depicting the whole animal, another (worse) of a nephridium, and a third (unfounded) representing a conventional branched tube, spiral lining and all (sic). To be brief, the illustrations are mostly bad, and might well be dispensed with. Of those copied from well-known figures, many are spoilt in the copying, while the remainder are such as might have been produced in the greatest haste by a person accustomed to reading about, but not to handling, objects of the class delineated.

Outlines of Zoology.

By J. Arthur Thomson, Lecturer on Zoology in the School of Medicine, Edinburgh. (Edinburgh and London: Young J. Pentland, 1892.)