“List’ning the doors an’ winnocks rattle”: lines from Burns’s “A Winter Night.”
CHAPTER IX
TO THE TEACHER
Make this chapter, as far as you can, the one in the volume for most intensive study. Show the pupils how the study of animal life is connected with geology, tell them of the record of life in the fossils of the rocks, the kinds of strange beasts that once inhabited the earth. Show them again how the study of animals in their anatomy is not the study of one—say of man, but how man and all the mammals, the reptiles, the birds, the fishes, the insects, on and on back to the single-celled amœba, are all related to each other, all links in one long wonder chain of life.
FOR THE PUPIL
Page 94
Charles Lamb: Look up his life in the Encyclopedia. Read for yourselves his essay on Roast Pig.
modus edibilis: the Latin for “manner of eating.”
Page 95
the ’possum’s relations: They are the marsupials, the pouched animals, like the kangaroo.
Page 98