Book Reviews 625

treats, a female tree-shrew cannibalizing her young.

MONIQUE BORGERHOFF-MULDER Large Animal Research Group, 34A Storey's Way, Cambridge CB3 0DT, U.K.

of a 'naive biology', of the mind/body issue) with which Toates introduces and concludes his book. A student who takes to heart what Toates has to say on these matters should come away with a proper understanding of the sense in which biology can be regarded as providing a foundation for the study of behaviour.

Biological Foundations qf Behaviour, By FREDERICK TOATES. Milton Keynes: Open University Press (1986). Pp.xiii + 130. Price s (paperback).

Designed as a revision text for an Open University course, this book presents a clear if very elementary account of some of the biological foundations of behaviour. Presumably, the decision as to what constitutes a 'biological foundation' was taken by those who constructed the original course. How- ever that may be, Toates gives pride of place to a description of the structure and functioning of the nervous system and of individual neurons, and he shows how a knowledge of neuronal systems can help to explain habituation and a range of percep- tual phenomena. The rest of the factual content of the book is devoted to learning (chiefly animal conditioning) and motivation. These are not included as further examples of phenomena that can be explained in terms of anatomy and physio- logy (the level of analysis is, for the most part, psychological) and one must assume that they are taken to be instances of basic biological processes upon which more complex phenomena are founded. This is a little odd; if learning and motivation can be treated in this way, why not emotion, or cognition, or any other psychological process? The book would have been more faithful to its title if this material had been replaced with a discussion of the principles of genetics and of natural selection, branches of biology with a claim every bit as good as that of physiology to be considered as foundations for the study of beha- viour.

Although one may debate the selection of con- tents, the style of presentation seems to me just right. Important issues are presented prominently, scholarly qualifications to generalizations are kept to the decent minimum and, most important in a book of this type, the text seemed to be entirely free of errors of fact. I am afraid, however, that the didactic style favoured by the Open University (with its 'modules' and 'self assessment questions' and so on) might act as a deterrent to students from other institutions. This would be a pity; no doubt they could revise the factual material presented here in other ways but they would miss the sensible and thoughtful discussions of more general issues (of levels of explanation in science, of the dangers

Department of Psychology, University of York, York YOI 5DD, U.K.

GEOFFREY HALL

Collins Eno'clopedia qf Animal Biology. Edited by R. MeN. ALEXANDER. London: Collins (1986). Pp, xvi+ 144. Price s

Zoology has been too successful: in the 200 years since Linnaeus, palaeontology, embryology, gene- tics, ecology, parasitology, immunology, ethology, biotechnology and many other sciences have evolved from the parent discipline. As the Darwi- nian theory of evolution would have predicted, the ancestral form feels itself in danger of extinction through competition for resources with its more vigorous descendants, causing some zoologists, including those who selected the title of this book, to shun the term 'zoology'. Neither is this book an 'encyclopedia' in the conventional sense of the term; it is more a summary of conventional wisdom about some of the topics to which zoologists can still claim to be the most active contributors. The text is arranged in nine chapters, each with a dozen or more sub-headings. Although only two of the eight authors are Americans, the entire text has been transcribed into American spelling and syn- tax, which mixes unhappily with the distinctive style of some of the European authors. The first chapter is a brief introduction to the principles of classification and a survey of the major phyla. The rest of the book is devoted to topics such as digestion, osmoregulation, circulation, sensory physiology, neurophysiology and animal move- ment which, since the early seventies, have been included in typical zoology courses for final year school pupils and beginning undergraduates. One of the best features of the book is a five-page glossary consisting of accurate, succinct definitions of the technical terms and referring to items in the comprehensive index, which appears, in very fine print, at the back.

The lavish colour photographs, many of them full-page, suggest emphasis on the comparative approach and a role for species-specific descrip- tions of physiological processes, but the stylized, Scientific American-style drawings convey a simple