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.
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