Elements of comparative anatomy / by Carl Gegenbaur ; translated by F. Jeffrey Bell ; the translation revised and a preface written by E. Ray Lankester.
- Carl Gegenbaur
- Date:
- 1878
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Elements of comparative anatomy / by Carl Gegenbaur ; translated by F. Jeffrey Bell ; the translation revised and a preface written by E. Ray Lankester. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION. It is a great pleasure to me to be able to place in the hands of my pupils in Oxford and London an English translation of Professor Gegenbaur's Grundriss der Vergleichenden Anatomic. I have to thank the energy and industry of Mr. Jeffrey Bell, of Magdalen College, Oxford (now one of the staff of the British Museum), for the translation which he undertook and carried through at my request, when I found that my time was too fully occu- pied with other work to allow of my completing it myself within a suffi- ciently short period from the date of publication of the German work. My share of the present work has therefore consisted in a careful revision of the MS. and proof-sheets, which has been by no means a mere formality, but enables me to give the assurance that the original work is faithfully rendered in the translation. The chapter on the Tunicata I took occasion to translate myself. That Professor Gegenbaur's work will be of great service to those English students who do not ah^eady read German cannot be doubted. We have some excellent treatises in the English language on animal morpho- logy, notably the Manuals of the Anatomy of Vertebrate and Invertebrate Animals, by Professor Huxley. But we do not possess any modern Avork on Comparative Anatomy, properly so-called; that is to say, a work in which the comparative method is put prominently forward as the guiding principle in the treatment of the results of anatomical investigation. The present work therefore appears to me to form a most important supplement to our existing treatises on the structure and classification of animals. It has, over and above this, a distinctive and weighty recommendation in that throughout and without reserve the Doctrine of Evolution appears as the living, moving investment of the dry bones of anatomical fact. ]^ot only is the student thus taught to retain and accumulate his facts in relation to definite problems which are actually exercising the ingenuity of investigators,](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20417202_0013.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
