TEE BREEDING SALMON. 5°3 



CONTRIBUTIONS TO BIOLOGY FROM INVESTIGATIONS 

 ON THE BREEDING SALMON. 



By YANDELL HENDERSON, Ph.D., 

 YALE UNIVERSITY. 



TN science as in history, it often happens that facts bare and dry iu 

 -*- themselves are infused with a sympathetic human interest, when 

 viewed as events in the lives of men. Such an interest, focused in 

 a single devoted investigator, and intensified by the pathos of his death, 

 attaches to the name of Friedrich Miescher, late professor of physiology 

 in Basel. In 181)5 by more than twenty years of laborious investigation, 

 he had brought to a successful conclusion one of the most brilliant and 

 important researches ever attempted in biological chemistry. Up to 

 that time few and incomplete reports of these results had appeared in 

 print, the personal modesty and scientific caution of the investigator 

 tempting him to delay publication. So it happened that the great mass 

 of his researches was recorded in notes which only their author could 

 decipher, when Miescher was seized by a mortal disease, and after a 

 lingering illness, with the chapters describing his work completed in 

 his brain, but with no strength to transfer them to paper, he died in 

 the bitterness of a life work completed, but unpublished. 



It may indeed be doubted whether the value of Miescher's work 

 would have received full recognition twenty years ago, since many of 

 his investigations then completed bear on problems which had formed 

 themselves in the minds of few biologists of that time. To-day, how- 

 ever, these problems are of universal interest. The recent publication 

 of two volumes* containing the few papers which Miescher had pub- 

 lished, both on the salmon and on other subjects (which by themselves 

 would entitle him to a high place among physiologists), together with 

 extracts from his letters to his colleagues describing his work, and such 

 of his notes as could be utilized, dates Miescher's work from the present 

 time rather than the period of its performance. 



For a proper understanding of the extraordinary tissue changes 

 which he discovered in the breeding salmon, Miescher found it neces- 

 sary to investigate fully the life and habits of these fish during their 

 sojourn in fresh water. Of this subject little more was known than 

 such practical knowledge as fishermen had developed. The position of 

 Basel close to the head waters of the Rhine, the breeding ground of the 



* Friedrich Miescher, ' Histochemische und Physiologische Arbeiten'; Leip- 

 zig, F. C. W. Vogel, 1897. 



