Ecology

These little books are three out of a series of ten with which the publishers hope to capture some of the market provided by elementary college biology courses. The notion of a large number of paperbacks replacing a single, hard-bound text has a certain number of theoretical advantages, two of which I would like to mention. The first, which is almost always pointed out in publishers' advance notices, is that paperbacks are inexpensive. But this kindness to the students' pocketbooks is deceptive; to get a complete course in biology the student must buy ten of these little books-and $17.50 is exorbitant for a beginning text in this field. The second theoretical advantage is that biology today is so highly specialized that no one biologist is competent to write an entire text covering many fields. There is, however, a third reason for publishing these little books which is rather less admirable. The beginning biology text is the biggest money-maker in the field, by dint of the sheer numbers of students taking courses each year which require that they buy some one or other of these texts. In 1961, Prentice-Hall brought out a series of eleven little paperbacks which they named the "Foundations of Modern Biology Series." Had Messrs. Holt, Rinehart and Winston really taken as their basic aims such things as economy and expertise, they could not have failed to notice that these aims had been achieved two years ago. Furthermore, I have heard it rumored that within a fairly short time a third publishing house is going to dump upon the market its little series of biological paperbacks. I am well aware of the grand old philosophy of our academic publishers (with the natural exception of University Presses, and the unnatural exception of a few commercial presses who will soon learn better) which rightly points out that unless every other page is printed upside down, the ink smeared, or the pages uncut, every basic text published will get a percentage of the market, regardless of the superiority of the competing texts. It is very easy to censure the publishers for this, and they do of course deserve a certain amount of blame. But they will be the first to admit that their primary aim is to make money. Our primary aim is to educate students well, and any teacher who buys texts without reading them carefully is more to blame than the publishers. Now let us look at the books which prompted the above. The Liing Plant by Ray seems to be quite adequate. It is clearly written and covers the necessary amount of material. The same can be said of Odum's Ecology. I think that Dr. Odum may have included too much material on laboratory and field work for freshmen, but it is always interesting to students to know how research is carried out even if they cannot carry it out themselves. Personally, I would have liked to have seen a better and more detailed definition and discussion of ecological niches, but this again is a compara-