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preliminary exercise.

By the time the student has read the "Circulation of the Rabbit"
(Sections 34 to 49), he will be ready to begin dissection. It is
possible to hunt to death even such a sound educational maxim as
the "thing before the name," and we are persuaded, by a
considerable experience, that dissection before some such
preparatory reading is altogether a mistake. At the end of the book
is a syllabus (with suggestions) for practical work, originally drawn
up by the writer for his own private use with the evening classes of
the University Tutorial College-- classes of students working mainly
in their spare time for the London examination, and at an enormous
disadvantage, as regards the number of hours available, in
comparison with the leisurely students of a University laboratory.
This syllabus may, perhaps by itself, serve a useful purpose in some
cases, but in this essential part of the study the presence of some
experienced overlooker to advise, warn, and correct, is at first almost
indispensable.

A few words may, perhaps be said with respect to the design of this
volume. It is manifestly modelled upon the syllabus of the
Intermediate Examination in Science of London University. That
syllabus, as at present constituted, appears to me to afford
considerable scope for fairly efficient biological study. The four types
dealt with in this book are extremely convenient for developing the
methods of comparative anatomy and morphological embryology.
Without any extensive reference to related organisms, these four
forms, and especially the three vertebrata, may be made to explain
and illustrate one another in a way that cannot fail to be educational
in the truest sense. After dealing with the rabbit, therefore, as an
organic mechanism, our sections upon the frog and dog-fish, and
upon development, are simply statements of differences, and a
commentary, as it were, upon the anatomy of the mammalian type.
In the concluding chapter, a few suggestions of the most elementary
ideas of it is hoped to make this first part of our biological course
complete in itself, and of some real and permanent value to the
student. And the writer is convinced that not only is a constant
insistence upon resemblances and differences, and their import,
intellectually the most valuable, but also the most interesting, and
therefore the easiest, way of studying animal anatomy. That chaotic
and breathless cramming of terms misunderstood,