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; and I have no hesitation
whatever in saying, that any one who has gone through such a course,
attentively, is in a better position to form a conception of the great
truths of Biology, especially of morphology (which is what we chiefly
deal with), than if he had merely read all the books on that topic put