514 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



the pioneer in vegetable chemistry, especially as his research work has been so 

 largely occupied with the investigation of the vegetable proteins. 



The book, though short, is a veritable mine of information, and the very 

 complete bibliography provided enhances its value to the original investigator 

 and to the senior student. It is dry, solid reading, and so hardly the kind of 

 book one would take as a solace on a railway journey ; its proper place is the 

 laboratory, and as a work of reference. 



The protein cycle starts in the vegetable cell ; for here it is that the complex 

 albuminous molecule is first built up from simple compounds. Animal protein, 

 about which more is known, is secondarily formed from vegetable protein or 

 from its cleavage products. Whether the chemist in his attempts to unravel 

 the secrets of the protein molecule should follow Nature's order is questionable ; 

 at any rate that has not hitherto been the method chemists have decided to 

 follow, for curiously enough the simplest members of the protein family, and 

 those therefore most likely to be correctly analysed and successfully synthesised, 

 are not those found in the vegetable world. 



The vegetable proteins differ in many particulars from their cousins in the 

 animal cell, but they do not appear to be any less complex than the most complex 

 members of the animal group. These differences are set forth with full details 

 in Dr. Osborne's book, and one can confidently recommend it to all interested 

 in this most important subject. 



W. D. Halliburton. 



An Introduction to the Geology of Cape Colony. By A. W. Rogers, D.Sc, 

 F.G.S., and A. L. Du Toit, B.A., F.G.S., of the Geological Survey of Cape 

 Colony, with a chapter on the Fossil Reptiles of the Karroo Formation, 

 by Prof. R. Broom, M.D., B.Sc, C.M.Z.S., of Victoria College, Stellen- 

 bosch. [Pp. xii + 491.] (London : Longmans, Green & Co., 1909. Price 

 gs. net.) 



THE authors may be congratulated on the production of a greatly improved edition 

 of a book that was of excellent quality in its original form. The recent important 

 work of the Survey on the pras-Cape rocks of the north of the Colony have 

 enabled them to give, at least in this region, a connected account of a long 

 succession of ancient, practically unfossiliferous formations, interrupted at different 

 points by well-marked discordances in the stratification, one of which is believed 

 to include the entire period of the deposition of the great Witwatersrand 

 formation of the Transvaal, as well as of its removal, if it were ever laid down 

 in this area. 



It is of interest to find at different horizons in these old rocks important beds 

 of limestone containing, as a rule, a large percentage of magnesia. These exhibit 

 at times oolitic structure, but yield only indistinct and unrecognisable traces of 

 organisms. 1 If, as the authors believe, they were laid down below the sea, 

 they furnish the only evidence that a large portion of South Africa has ever 

 been subjected to marine conditions. 



In the Griqua Town Series, which overlies the blue dolomitic limestones of the 



1 They closely resemble an unfossiliferous limestone found at Corumbd and 

 elsewhere in Matto Grosso, Brazil. 



