The Science of Life

This is a single title from the publisher's 24-volume 'Library of Science and Technology'. Most life-science books, especially for older children, set out to identify and differentiate forms of life and it is refreshing to find one that concentrates on similarities among living organisms - similarities which exist because they are the basis of life itself. Plant cells and animal cells are remarkably the same and serve the same basic purposes. That they have evolved different specialist ways of serving these purposes accounts for the notional division of biology into botany and zoology, two sciences which have far more in common than they have differences.

This book concentrates on the common factors; animals and plants proceed through it side by side. We find, for instance, that sundew and fleas are as carnivorous as pythons and lions, nutrition is the getting of energy to feed body cells, be they flycatcher or fern, and flowers have as active a sex life as the insects that help them with it.

Here is an excellent start to a mature study of biology, a study with which the well-selected bibliography will help. An awareness of the wholeness of life is probably the key to the survival of our planet as we know it and the presence of this simple book provides an incremental increase in the likelihood of that survival.