Book Description

Excerpt from An Introduction to General Biology Several years ago it was our good fortune to follow, as graduate students, a course of lectures and practical study in General Biology under the direction of Professor Martin, at Johns Hopkins University. So interesting and suggestive was the general method employed in this course which, in its main outlines, had been marked out by Huxley and Martin ten years before, that we were persuaded that beginners in biology should always be introduced to the subject in some similar way. The present work thus owes its origin to the influence of the authors of the "Elementary Biology," our deep indebtedness to whom we gratefully acknowledge. It is still an open question whether the beginner should pursue the logical but different course of working upwards from the simple to the complex, or adopt the easier and more practical method of working downwards from familiar higher forms. Every teacher of the subject knows how great are the practical difficulties besetting the novice, who, provided for the first time with a compound microscope, is confronted with Yeast, Protococcus, or Amoeba; and on the other hand, how hard it is to sift out what is general and essential from the heterogeneous details of a mammal or a flowering plant. In the hope of lessening the practical difficulties of the logical method we have used for some time with our own classes, and have found practical and effective. It has not been our ambition to prepare an exhaustive treatise. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.