DISSECTION PROJECTS

How to dissect clams, squid, chickens, and other animals easily obtained from the fish market or grocery. Webster describes external and internal anatomy, provides related projects or models, and includes recipes for cooking some of the subjects after investigating them. The young enthusiast will find this an appealing (if not fully satisfying) introduction, providing less detail than is commonly found in encyclopedias or high-school biology texts. But some of the internal dissection directions are too brief, and the line drawings fail to show some essential organs. For instance, the clam's mantle, gill, foot, and siphon tube are shown, but the author lists five additional organs that ""will be difficult to identify""; unfortunately, the illustrator simply omits them. And two labels (small intestine, mesentery) are reversed in a diagram of a chicken's internal organs. Index; brief list of further reading.