694 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



The Unity of the Organism ; or, The Organismal Conception of Life. By 



William Emerson Ritter, Director of the Scripps Institution for 

 Biological Research of the University of California, La Jolla, Cali- 

 fornia. 2 Vols. (Vol. I, pp. xxix + 398 ; Vol. II, pp. xv + 408.) 

 (Boston : Richard G. Badger, 191 9. Price $5.00 net.) 



From the earliest times in the history of science, biologists have speculated 

 on the relation of the organism to its parts, and among both botanists and 

 zoologists, as well as general biologists, there have been those who have held 

 the organism as completely explicable in terms of its component parts. 

 In this book the author reviews the evidence in favour of and against the 

 various theories that have been put forward involving this point of view, 

 and more than half the book may be regarded as a presentation of the case 

 against the various elementalist theories of the organism, from which the 

 author vigorously dissents, and the presentation of the case for the organismal 

 theory, which would regard the whole organism as the unit. 



A review of the various theories of the plant body that have held sway 

 during the last hundred years or more was given three years ago by Fitting, 

 and published as a little book under the title of Die Pflanze als lebende Organ- 

 ismus. The present work has a much wider scope, for the author deals not 

 only with the organism generally, but considers the various elementalist 

 theories, and shows them all to be untenable. Thus the Cell Theory, the 

 Mitochondrial Theory of Heredity, and the Chromosome Theory of Heredity, 

 are examined and dismissed one after another. 



In the second part of the book the author examines the interdependence 

 of the various parts of the organism. From growth and internal secretions 

 he proceeds to the nervous system and the interdependence of its various 

 parts, and the involving with it of other organs, and finally to psychical 

 phenomena, the work concluding with an Organismal Theory of Conscious- 

 ness, to the effect that all manifestations which in the aggregate are 

 called life, including those of a consciously psychical nature, result from 

 chemical reaction between the organism and its environment. 



To the experimentalist, and especially to the physiologist, a great deal 

 of this book will appear as a storm in a tea-cup. Few physiologists to-day 

 doubt the correctness of the outlook that regards the organism as a unit, 

 though apparently, from the citations and references given in this book, this 

 outlook is not universal. Also it must be admitted that the writing suffers 

 sometimes from vagueness. Thus the first section of Chapter VI is given 

 the title " What the Cell-Theory is, Viewed Historically and Substantively," 

 but after reading the section, the chief impression one obtains is that the 

 cell-theory is a number of different things, all more or less indefinite. 



Nevertheless, in spite of this, and in spite of a certain garrulousness, 

 which is perhaps most noteworthy in the preface, the book is well worth 

 reading, for the writer passes in review a great mass of material, the corre- 

 lation of which is in itself a great achievement. w c 



The Morphology and Evolutional Significance of the Pineal Body, being Part I 

 of a Contribution to the Study of the Epiphysis Cerebri and an In- 

 terpretation of the Morphological, Physiological, and Clinical Evidence. 



By Frederick Tilney, M.D., Ph.D., and Luther F. Warren, A.B., 

 M.D. (American Anatomical Memoirs, No. 9, Wistar Institute, 1919-) 



This publication, the first part of an extensive memoir on one of the most 

 interesting regions of the brain, is concerned with the historical, histological, 

 embryological, and comparative morphological aspects of the subject clearly 

 indicated in the title, the functional and clinical aspects being reserved for a 

 subsequent paper. From the zoological point of view, therefore, the paper may 

 be considered in two separate parts, of which the present is the more important. 



