Excerpt from Biology: The Story of Living Things

Here are a few chips left over from the authors' workshop.

First of all we do not pretend to have presented herein the last word in a field already overcrowded by worthy rivals. The last word has an undesirable mortuary connotation quite out of keeping in a book about living things.

The authors have been teaching biology for a total of ninety-four academic years, in addition to over sixty seasons of strenuous service in summer field work with classes at marine and fresh-water labora tories, and they can truthfully and enthusiastically say that they have enjoyed this experience.

If what they would pass on to other students of biology appears from the table of contents to bear the familiar marks of old stuff, the reason is that it represents, in their minds at least, what remains after many years of trial and elimination at the hands of an army of different teachers and scholars. The fact that much material that has been worked over before it was retained does not necessarily prevent, it is hoped, some degree of freshness in its presentation. Any text book, the authors hold, should be somewhat like a dish of uncracked nuts, accompanied by a good substantial nutcracker. It is desirable that the reader should have some of the fun of wielding the nutcracker, for no pedagogical cellophane can preserve nuts already shelled in an entirely fresh and satisfactory condition for a very long time.

An inevitable handicap that the textbook method of presentation of any subject is bound to suffer, is the fact that between the covers of a book the whole banquet is set upon the table at once in a more or less complete array. It is the part of the instructor to break up the feast into courses and to serve them in digestible portions. Perhaps the method of suspense employed in magazine serials would furnish a better way of arriving at the desired end than presenting the matter all at once in book form, since sufficient time should always be pro vided between the planting and harvesting of intellectual ideas to allow for unforced sprouting and growth.

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