A Text-book of Zoology

1897

Special Collections QL47 P719 1897

London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd.

A textbook is not often fertile ground for an historical study but this book, published in London in 1897, is special. The authors, Thomas Jeffery Parker FRS (1850-1897; Otago University) and William Aitcheson Haswell FRS (1854-1925; Sydney University) were both evolutionists and advocated a practical ‘hands-on’ style of teaching. Parker spent the last two years of his life working intensely with his Sydney-based colleague on this book. Their correspondence provided glimpses of the enormity of the task they had set themselves: ‘I fear it will be an awfully fat book’, Parker wrote to Haswell on 18th June 1895. Most of the illustrations for this two-volume work were specially drawn. In my PhD thesis ‘Evolution Made Visible: The Worlds of Thomas Jeffery Parker (1850-1897) the Noted New Zealand Zoologist’ I used this book extensively.
(Chosen by Dr Rosi Crane, Otago Museum, Dunedin)