A textbook of animal physiology, with introductory chapters on general biology and a full treatment of reproduction
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| A text-book of animal physiology - Wesley Mills |
Tue comparative method, the introduction of the teachings of embryology and of the welding principles of evolution as part of the essential structure of zoology, may be said to have completely revolutionized that science; and there is scarcely a text-book treating of the subject, however, elementary, which has not been moulded by these guiding lines of thought. So far as I am aware, this can not be said of a single book on the subject of physiology.
Feeling, therefore, that the time had come for the appearance of a work which should attempt to do, in some degree at least, for physiology what has been so well done for morphology, the present task was undertaken. But there were other changes which it seemed desirable to make. I think anyone who will examine the methods and reasoning of the physiology of the day will not fail, on close scrutiny, to recognize a tendency to speak of certain conclusions, for various organs (and functions), as though they applied to these organs in whatever group of animals found, or, at all events, for man, no matter what the species of the animal that had been experimented upon.
For some years I have, in publications of my own original research, strongly protested against such methods as illogical, I am wholly at a loss to understand how a work, built upon the most fragmentary and hetero-generous evidence, derived from experiments on a few groups of animals, or a certain amount of human clinical or pathological evidence, can be fittingly termed a treatise on “ human physiology.”
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