IX] HARTING'S MORPHOLOGIE SYNTHETIQUE 653 



Mr George Rainey, of St Thomas's Hospital (of whom we have 

 spoken before), and Professor P. Harting, of Utrecht, were the 

 first to deal with this specific problem. Rainey published, between 

 1857 and 1861, a series of valuable and thoughtful papers to shew 

 that shell and bone and certain other organic structures were formed 

 "by a process of molecular coalescence, demonstrable in certain 

 artificially formed products*." Harting, after thirty years of 

 experimental work, published in 1872 a paper, which has become 

 classical, entitled Recherches de morphologie synthetique, sur la pro- 

 duction artificielle de quelques fonnations calcaires organiques f ; his 

 aim was to pave the way for a "morphologie synthetique," as 

 Wohler had laid the foundations of a "chimie synthetique" by his 

 classical discovery forty years before. 



Rainey and Harting used similar methods — and these were such 

 as other workers have continued to employ — partly with the direct 

 object of explaining the genesis of organic forms and partly as an 

 integral part of what is now known as Colloid Chemistry. The gist 

 of the method was to bring some soluble salt of hme, such as the 

 chloride or nitrate, into solution within a colloid medium, such as 

 gum, gelatine or albumin; and then to precipitate it out in the 

 form of some insc/luble compound, such as the carbonate or oxalate. 

 Harting found that, when he added a httle sodium or potassium 

 carbonate to a concentrated solution of calcium chloride in albumin, 

 he got at first a gelatinous mass, or "colloid precipitate": which 

 slowly transformed by the appearance of tiny microscopic particles, 



* George Rainey, On the- elementary formation of the skeletons of animals, and 

 other hard structures formed in connection with living tissue, Brit, and For. Med. 

 Ch. Rev. XX, pp. 451-476, 1857; published separately with additions, 8vo, London, 

 1858. For other papers by Rainey on kindred subjects see Q.J. M.S. vi (Tr. 

 Microsc. Soc), pp. 41-50, 1858; vii, pp. 212-225, 1859; vm, pp. 1-10, 1860; 

 I (n.s.), pp. 23-32, 1861. Cf. also W. Miller Ord, On the influence exercised by colloids 

 upon crystalline form, pp. x, 179, 1874; cf. also Q.J.M.S. xii, pp. 219-239, 1872; 

 also the early but still interesting observations of Mr Charles Hatchett, Chemical 

 experiments on zoophytes; with some observations on the component parts of 

 membrane, Phil. Trans. 1800, pp. 327-402. For early references to sclerites formed 

 in cells, see (e.g.) L. Selenka, Z.J.w.Z. xxxiii, p. 45, 1879 and R. Semon, Mitth. 

 Zool. St. Neapel, vii, p. 288, 1886 (both in holothurians) ; Blochmann, Die 

 Epithelfrage hei Cestodenu. Trcmatoden, Hamburg, 1896; also Leger's Observations 

 on crystals of calcium oxalate in tlie cysts , of Lithocystis Schneider i, A. M.N. II. (6), 

 xviii^ p. 479, 1895. 



t Cf. Q.J.M.S. XII, pp. 118-123, 1872. 



