re than a comparatively small number of animals and plants.

Let me tell you what we do in the biological laboratory which is lodged
in a building adjacent to this. There I lecture to a class of students
daily for about four-and-a-half months, and my class have, of course,
their text-books; but the essential part of the whole teaching, and that
which I regard as really the most important part of it, is a laboratory
for practical work, which is simply a room with all the appliances
needed for ordinary dissection. We have tables properly arranged in
regard to light, microscopes, and dissecting instruments, and we work
through the structure of a certain number of animals and plants. As, for
example, among the plants, we take a yeast plant, a _Protococcus_, a
common mould, a _Chara_, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals
we examine such things as an _Amoeba_, a _Vorticella_, and a
fresh-water polype. We dissect a star-fish, an earth-worm, a snail, a
squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a cray-fish,
and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a cod-fish, a frog, a
tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time
we have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled
dissectors, but to give every student a clear and definite conception,
by means of sense-images, of the characteristic structure of each of the
leading modifications of the animal kingdom; and that is perfectly
possible, by going no further than the length of that list of forms
which I have enumerated. If a man knows the structure of the animals I
have mentioned, he has a clear and exact, however limited, apprehension
of the essential features of the organisation of all those great
divisions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms to which the forms I have
mentioned severally belong. And it then becomes possible for him to read
with profit; because every time he meets with the name of a structure,
he has a definite image in his mind of what the name means in the
particular creature he is reading about, and therefore the reading is
not mere reading. It is not mere repetition of words; but every term
employed in the description, we will say, of a horse, or of an elephant,
will call up the image of the things he had seen in the rabbit, and he
is able to form a distinct conception of that which he has not seen, as
a modification of that which he has seen.

I find this system to yield excellent results;