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Abstract

THE author states in his preface to this book that his aim in writing it has been to fill the need of a simple, yet accurate, scientific account, intelligible to the adolescent boy or girl, of the phenomena of the reproduction of life. The problem of selection and presentation of material for a book of this kind is a difficult one, as any one who has had experience of teaching hygiene to school children will appreciate, and Mr. Cokkinis has not been very successful in solving it. He has attempted to cover an unnecessarily wide field. Those sections on plant and animal reproduction, in which he describes and figures, often inaccurately (see, for example, Figs. 59 and 69), the reproductive organs in plants, and in the more important classes of the animal kingdom, can be studied in any elementary text-book of biology, with this advantage, that they are there set forth with correctness of detail. A short account of the cellular basis of living organisms, with a clear description of the differences between asexual and sexual reproduction, oviparous and viviparous development, would have been sufficient introduction to the study of the question in man. The great difficulty which the average individual naturally experiences in visualising, with any clearness, the position and relation of the organs of the body, makes it absolutely essential that these points should be illustrated by careful, large-scale drawings. Isolated diagrams of partially dissected systems, such as are given in this book, convey nothing to the untrained mind.

The Reproduction of Life a Handbook of the Science of Reproduction in Nature and Man.

A. J.

Cokkinis

By. Pp. xvi + 287. (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1926.) 10s. 6d. net.