Abstract
THE increased interest in zoology certainly existing at the present time is one of the causes which has induced Prof. Davis to attempt a natural history written on lines totally different from those usually followed in works of this kind. In place of treating the various animal groups in more or less full detail according to their presumed relationship to one another, it is proposed to consider them in relation to their environment, and to lay special stress on the interdependence of animals and plants, and the bearing upon life of chemical and physical conditions. Such a mode of treatment undoubtedly has great possibilities before it, and is one which should do good by drawing attention to our lack of knowledge as to the reason of many of the structural peculiarities of animals. It is, indeed, one of the reproaches that may be legitimately brought against our present methods of zoological study that we attach far too much importance to describing and recording minute differences between closely allied animals to the utter neglect of the study of their life-history. Whether the author will be successful in this mode of treatment we cannot at present even conjecture, for the two sections of the work now before us are devoted to a brief systematic survey of the leading groups of the animal kingdom, which must form a necessary introduction to its proper subject. These two sections may, indeed, be regarded as a kind of “index-museum” to the rest of the work. They are important as serving to show that from no point of view can systematic zoology be neglected, and also that the issue of a work like the present in no wise renders the-older type of natural history superfluous. There is ample room for both, and neither poaches on the preserves of its fellow.
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L., R. A New Natural History 1 . Nature 67, 562–563 (1903). https://doi.org/10.1038/067562a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/067562a0