First course in biology

This isn't your grandmother's biology textbook, though it might well be your great-grandmother's. Written in the early 20th century, this pioneering secondary school text anticipated modern pedagogical thinking by decades, emphasizing hands-on observation and experiment over dry memorization. Moore Coleman presents plant, animal, and human biology as a unified whole, revealing the surprising connections between all living things and their environments. The book bursts with classroom exercises and field activities that would feel right at home in today's STEM curricula: dissections, specimen collection, soil analysis, and careful observation of everyday nature. What makes this volume genuinely fascinating is its ecological perspective, woven through every chapter. Long before ecology became a discipline, this textbook understood that structure follows function, and function follows environment. For educators, history of science enthusiasts, or anyone curious about how we once taught young people to see the living world, this century-old text offers both a time capsule and a surprisingly fresh approach to understanding life on Earth.