Outlines of evolutionary biology / by Arthur Dendy.

  • Arthur Dendy
Date:
[1912]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Outlines of evolutionary biology / by Arthur Dendy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/480
    PREFACE -»- Biology, the fundamental science of living things in all their manifold relations, is a study which, at the present time, is but little encouraged by educational authorities in this country. It has no place in the ordinary school curriculum and even in our Universities it has been thrust into the background, partly because University authorities devote so much of their attention nowadays to subjects which are considered more likely to bring in a direct pecuniary reward to the student, and partly because of the immense elaboration of the various branches of biological science, such as Zoology, Botany, Physiology, Com¬ parative Anatomy and Embryology, that has taken place in recent years, and the claims of these to more or less separate recognition. The student, if he studies Biology at all for its own sake, which is seldom the case, usually confines himself almost entirely to one or other of these branches, which he finds treated more or less as an independent science, with an extensive literature of its own, and he runs a grave risk of losing sight of the general principles which underlie all and from which all derive their chief educational value. The medical student, it is true, usually takes a year’s course in what is called Biology, but his curriculum is, perhaps unavoidably, dominated by the type-system and by what is thought likely to be of direct service to him in his future anatomical and physiological studies, so that in the brief time which the medical authorities allow him to devote to the scientific foundation of his professional work he has but little opportunity for a philosophical treatment of the subject. When we at length come to realize the meaning of Man’s position as, for the time being, the highest term of a great evolutionary series which stretches far back into the dawn of
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