This book is devoted to the study of invertebrate animals. While most people associate the word "animal" with fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, 90% of the animal species on earth are invertebrates, i.e., they have no backbone. Protozoans and invertebrate animals are found world-wide, from the bottom of the oceans to the the rain forests, ice caves, and our own back yards. Many invertebrates still reside in the oceans, while others dwell in our houses, back yards and gardens, in ponds and streams, and on the menus in seafood restaurants. Holders's book represents a traversal of several dozen familiar and not-so-familiar animals without backbones whose ancestors date back to the Cambrian period 500 million years ago.
By : Charles Holder (1851 - 1915)
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At the present day education is not complete without definite courses of nature study. We are living in an age of strenuous business life and activity, where the best equipped students along the various lines secure the best positions. Time was when zoölogy, botany, and kindred nature studies were classed with music and the so-called dead languages, and were taken up as incidentals or were employed in "mind training"; but to-day there are a thousand branches of trade and commerce which require knowledge that can be obtained only through nature study.
It is not necessary that the student, unless he intends to be a teacher of science or a professional naturalist, should be able to pass examinations in the abstruse classification of animals or delve into difficult anatomical studies. What the average student needs is a broad and general idea of animal life, its great divisions, and notably the relationship of the lower animals to man in an economic sense, the geographical distribution of animals, etc. It is vastly more important for the coming lumber merchant to know the relationship which forests bear to the water supply, and to have a general idea of forestry and the trees which make forests, than to be able to recite a long formula of classification or analysis, of value only to the advanced student or specialist. The future merchant who is to deal in alpaca, leather, dye, skins, hair, bone products, shell, pearl, lac, animal food products, ivory, whalebone, guano, feathers, and countless other articles derived from animals is but poorly equipped for the struggle for business supremacy if he is not prepared by nature study, nature readings, and other practical instruction along these lines.
It is believed to-day by those who have given the subject the closest attention that the initial move of the teacher should be to call the attention of the child to the beauties of nature, the works of the Infinite, and thus early inculcate a habit of observation. The toys of the kindergarten should be fruits, flowers, shrubs, trees, pebbles, and vistas of mountains, hills, lakes, and streams, and nature study in some form should be continuous in school life.
In the following readings the story of lower animal life has been presented on broad lines, divested of technicality, and at almost every step supplemented by forceful and explanatory illustrations as ocular aids to the reader. The subject has been divested of dry detail, and I have introduced notes and incidents, the results of personal observation and investigation in various lands and seas, and have given attention to the often neglected fauna of the Pacific coast as well as that of other regions.
While the volume is a supplementary reader, the matter is so arranged that it can be used by the teacher as a text-book, and the pupil who undertakes the various "half-hour readings" of this series will have covered in the main the ground of the ordinary text-book for intermediate grades in the form of readings. In a word, I have endeavored to make this volume a popular combined review and supplemental reader on the lower forms of animal life from the Amœba to the insects inclusive, and the series to follow will present the entire subject of animal life or zoölogy, voluminously illustrated, on a similar plan.
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