ESSAY-REVIEWS 77 



most interesting questions it raises cannot as yet be answered. 

 While White and Thiessen have effectually demolished the 

 old " algal theory " of coal, which postulated the existence 

 of peculiar, microscopic, jelly-like algae, this new coal raises 

 a new algal theory. Have we here a quite other type of " algal " 

 coal, a coal formed from fucoid sea-weeds ? So far as the 

 specimen goes it certainly looks like it. But regarding it I 

 will risk a prediction : when, if ever, this coal is found in situ 

 it will not be an extensive coal, but will be very restricted in 

 quantity. Extremely interesting observations are made by 

 Prof. Zalessky on the ash percentage of this coal in relation 

 to the ash percentage of the plants from which it was formed ; 

 the coal containing only about one-fourth of the ash present 

 in the living plants closely allied to the species which com- 

 posed it. This is not the place to elaborate ideas on the 

 subject, but Zalessky 's paper should be read in connection 

 with the above work on anthracites. The conjunction will be 

 found to be very suggestive. 



A GREAT MEDICAL REFORMER, by * * * : on John Shaw 

 Billings : a Memoir, by Fielding H. Garrison, M.D. [Pp. x -f 432, 

 with Illustrations.] (New York and London : G. P. Putnam's Sons, The 

 Knickerbocker Press, 1915. Price ioj-. 6d. net.) 



This is the record of the life and work of a man who was 

 unique in the history of his profession. Except in his official 

 capacity as an army surgeon in the War of the Rebellion, John 

 Shaw Billings never practised his profession in the common 

 acceptation of the term. Yet he did more to reform it, to 

 remake it, than any other individual worker either in his own 

 land or on this side of the Atlantic. 



Details of his early life are scanty. He was born in 1838 

 in Cotton Township, Indiana ; he was educated in Miami 

 University, where he took his Bachelor's degree in 1857 ; and 

 in 1895 he returned to his alma mater to deliver a suggestive 

 address on " Waste " to the students of a new generation. 

 In the autumn of 1858 he matriculated at the Medical College 

 of Ohio with which the Miami Medical College had just been 

 combined, and in i860 he took his medical degree. His 

 graduation thesis was entitled " The Surgical Treatment of 

 Epilepsy," and even in this, his first essay in medical literature, 



