The Nineteenth Century 229 



textbooks and reference works 



The great breadth of biology and the various avenues of approach 

 have led to a more complex literature dealing with the properties 

 of living things than the literature on the properties of inanimate 

 matter. Textbooks of chemistry and physics will adequately cover 

 inanimate subjects but the living world requires textbooks of 

 zoology, botany, anatomy, physiology (including biophysics and bio- 

 chemistry) , histology, perhaps entomology for special luminous 

 groups. The luminescence of living things has been treated in many 

 textbooks of various kinds, in some cases with outstanding articles, 

 but it is obvious that space will allow only a brief resume of the 

 most important texts. 



One of the earliest textbooks of biology in a broad sense was the 

 Biologic oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur (1802-1822) , the 

 five-volume work of G. H. Treviranus, already discussed. No subse- 

 quent " biology " during the century devoted as much space to lumi- 

 nous organisms although almost all such texts contained short chap- 

 ters or sections on bioluminescence. These frequently did little 

 more than mention that certain gioups of animals were luminous. 



The authors did not inquire into the chemical mechanism of light 

 production. Such considerations were left for the various physi- 

 ologies, which contained what was then known concerning the bio- 

 physics and biochemistry ^^ of animal light. Most textbooks of physi- 

 ology during the first half of the nineteenth century were quite 

 broad in outlook. They often dealt with comparative physiology, 

 even though their title might indicate the subject to be physiology 

 of man. They were more or less patterned on the eight-volume 

 Elementa Physiologiae Corporis Humani (Lausanne, 1759-1766) , of 

 Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) the great Bernese physiologist, 

 anatomist, botanist, and poet. The Elementa was translated into 

 German, and also in English as First Lines in Physiology (Edin- 

 burgh, 1786) . Haller's writings contained nothing on luminescence 

 but his followers frequently devoted considerable space to this 

 subject. 



If Haller was the physiologist of the eighteenth century with 

 widest interests, Johannes Miiller (1801-1858) must be considered 



^* It is unfortunate that the great Justus Liebig (1803-1873) did not discuss lumi- 

 nescence in an early animal biochemistry, Die Tierchemie oder der organische Chemie 

 in ihren Ainuendung auf Physiologie und Pathologie (Braunschweig, 1842) . Liebig 

 did state (see the English translation, Animal chemistry, 190-191, edited by Wm. 

 Gregory, 1842) , that Walchner had observed phosphoretted hydrogen bubbles spon- 

 taneously inflame " from the trough of a spring in Karlsruhe on the bottom of which 

 fish have putrified," and he is quoted (Heller, 1853: 45) as saying that the light of 

 dead fish was due to a phosphorus compound like PH3. 



