514 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Chemists as well as biologists, at the present time, need a thorough book on 

 the chemistry of fats — one in which the fats are fully and methodically treated, with 

 feeling, from the chemical standpoint but with due reference also to their bio- 

 logical significance. The accounts given in the current text-books are meagre 

 and of little practical value, whilst the pretentious special works fail to afford the 

 aid that is required on most essential points, being written apparently to show 

 the author's learning and so that a very safe margin is always left to be dispensed 

 in consultation. There is no book in which the vast mass of information on fats 

 in the possession of botanists and physiologists is properly codified and discussed. 

 It is time that fatty substances were once more brought into fashion among 

 chemists : of the three great groups of compounds of primary physiological 

 importance — the albuminoids, the carbohydrates and {pace the author) the lipoids — • 

 the last is by no means less interesting than the others ; innumerable problems 

 in connection with their occurrence, their genesis, their utilisation, call for pro- 

 longed and intimate study and workers are much needed in this field. The 

 medical schools should furnish them ; Dr. Leathes, in the past, has set a splendid 

 example which his colleagues might well follow. One of the tasks of the 

 University Commission now sitting should be to galvanise chemistry into being 

 in the Medical Schools and so secure for the science the recognition due to it 

 as the vital science : it is in no way surprising that students of medicine have 

 but scant belief in the usefulness of the subject when they see so little use being 

 made of the golden opportunities the hospitals afford. At present the poor 

 student is left to pick up knowledge of method as best he may — logic comes 

 nowhere in his scientific studies ; as a rule he cannot even sniff the atmosphere 

 of research : if more were done to make him familiar with the arguments on 

 which conclusions have been based, he would at least know that dogma counts 

 for little in practice. The work of Lawes and Gilbert and the other pugilists who 

 have contended over fat might well have been put before students in considerable 

 detail from this point of view in the book under notice — if such subjects had been 

 discussed properly, we should have had a monograph of value to students at large 

 on the biological significance of fats. 



Sketch of a Course of Chemical Philosophy. By Stanislao Cannizzaro 

 (1858). Alembic Club Reprints, No. 18. [Pp. 55.] (London Agents : 

 Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd. 1910. Price \s. 6d.) 

 In concluding his notice of Cannizzaro in a previous number of this Journal (July 

 1910, No. 17, pp. 147-60), Mr. Muir expressed the opinion that it was high time 

 that an English translation were made of the great Italian's course of chemical 

 philosophy. The want to which he called attention has long been felt ; it is now 

 met by the publication of the famous letter by the Alembic Club, as No. 18 of 

 their valuable series of reprints. Permission to publish the translation was 

 received from the venerable chemist only a few days before his death. The Club 

 is to be congratulated on the special excellence of the translation ; it is also to be 

 thanked most warmly on behalf of chemists and physicists generally for having 

 placed so valuable a document at public disposal. As the translator remarks in 

 his brief preface : " The facts are marshalled and their bearing explained with 

 absolute mastery of pedagogic method and one is compelled to the conclusion 

 that Cannizzaro's students of 1858 must have had clearer conceptions of chemical 

 theory than most of his colleagues of a much later date "—even than a majority of 

 students of physical science of to-day, it may be surmised. So fundamental a 

 matter as the determination of molecular weight finds no place in our text-books 



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