Reptiles, amphibia, fishes and lower chordata / by Richard Lydekker [and others].

Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Reptiles, amphibia, fishes and lower chordata / by Richard Lydekker [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    13/612
    PREFACE The kindly reception accorded to “A History of Birds ”—the second in the order of final sequence of this series—encourages me to believe that these volumes on vertebrate animal life which I pro- jected really supplied a need felt by that increasing body of men and women who profess themselves “ nature lovers Having conceived the plan of recording, at any rate in broad outline, the history of the vertebrates from the evolutionist’s point of view, I allotted to myself, as many already know, the task of writing the volume on Birds, and proposed to edit the remaining volumes rather than attempt to write them. And this because the day is now past when any single writer can hope to achieve such a task with even tolerable success, for this is the day of specialists. As a consequence, for the first time in the annals of natural history, the complete life-story of the reptiles, amphibia, and fishes, and those primitive creatures which lie at the foundations, so to speak, of the great house of the vertebrates, is told as only specialists can tell it. The very existence of these primitive ani- mals is unsuspected by most of us, but, as Professor Arthur Thomson shows, they present us with some most interesting and most important problems. The student of sociology will find in his chapters, no less than in those concerning more familiar creatures, much food for reflection bearing on the subjects of adaptation to environment, degeneration, and so on.
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