Excerpt from Introduction to the Study of Zoology: For Use in High Schools and Academies
Almost every text-book on logic draws the majority of its illustrations of logical processes from the development of the subject matter of the natural sciences. The natural sciences most clearly manifest the universal method of discursive thought; therefore, it is difficult to overestimate their importance as an element in education.
Of all the natural sciences, zoology is the one which can be used with the greatest economy of effort to give the mind facility in certain fundamental activities which lie at the foundation of all processes of logical thinking.
As the writer conceives it, the pedagogical content of zoology consists in training the pupil to gather knowledge at first hand and to get clear ideas of the objects studied, and in exercising his mind in its power of abstraction, concrete analysis, discrimination, comparison, generalization, and logical definition and in the recognition of logical identity. The results of the study conducted under the influence of such a conception are likely to be very different from what they would be if it were believed that the knowledge of a few animals is the chief end sought. To leave zoology out of a course of instruction is to omit the training of the mind in these directions, or to accomplish the same result by a much greater expenditure of energy in another subject than would be necessary in this.
Just as the benefit derived from the study of algebra is not to be looked for in the information conveyed in the answers to the problems that the student so laboriously solves, and the value of the study of Latin comes not from the knowledge of the historical facts that the pupil learns while reading the Latin language, so the value of the study of zoology does not depend upon the knowledge, of animals that the student acquires, but rather upon the power that the student acquires while gaining that knowledge.
A commendable text-book on zoology for high schools must concern itself, then, not so much with the development of the subject as with the development of the human mind.
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