LIFE OF THE PAST
By
A ditinguished paleontologist, attempting to fill in the gap between popular or journalistic pieces on his science and textbooks, presents a non-technical but brimmingly factual discussion of paleontology. He stresses not only the way men have gone about identifying fossils and the history of the science itself, but also the significance of fossils in tracing the history of all life on earth. He shows how paleontology is the fellow of geology and biology, how the sciences make use of one another, how economic paleontology fits into our industrial civilization. The perspective that man can achieve through such study is not the least of its values. An appendix in which classifications of plants and animals, with their characteristics, may be found rounds out a book packed with material within the range of the general reader.