742 



NATURE 



[February 3, 192 1 



war by the merchant seaman, the British Red 

 Cross Society and the Society of St. John 

 together gave to the Seamen's Hospital Society 

 the sum of 100,000!. for the purchase of the large 

 building in Endsleigh Gardens which had been used 

 in war-time as an officers' hospital, and for its en- 

 dowment as a hospital in the first instance for sailors 

 and soldiers who had contracted tropical diseases on 

 service, and ultimately for the sailors in perpetuity. 

 Room in this new Hospital for Tropical Diseases 

 being available, the society decided that the kindred 

 school should be included in the project. This deci- 

 sion was applauded by the school's sponsors at the 

 Colonial Office, and by the stimulating influence of 

 Lord Milner it attracted the ' necessary financial co- 

 operation of a liberal and appreciative section of the 

 public. Karly in the year 1920, therefore, the school 

 was translated from the remote, uncouth neighbour- 

 hood of the docks to an accessible London quarter 

 strong in academic associations. 



Re-established under such favourable auspices in a 

 central position, the school now prosecutes its original 

 design in all its fullness with an ampler staff and 

 equipment. The well-avouched scheme of a main 

 laboratory course, supplemented by clinical demon- 

 strations and a system of lectures, is unchanged, as 

 it both meets the wants of the man who already has 

 some knowledge of tropical conditions and inspires 

 the man to whom tropical responsibilities are pro- 

 spective. The clinical instruction, moreover, which 

 appeals so strongly to the practitioner coming home 

 for a season for professional rejuvenation, is improved 

 bv the institution of a special cl-nical laboratory attached 

 directly to the hospital and administered by its staff. 



It is, however, to the advanced student— to the 

 inquirer whose interests are not entirely engrossed 

 in medical practice and who appreciates the unlimited 

 opportunities for research that the tropics afford — 

 that the recent developments of the school arc more 

 particularly adapted. The departments of protozoology, 

 medical entomology, and helminthology have been re- 

 constituted as distinct units, leaving the original 

 nucleus of tropical pathology as a fourth independent 

 unit. Each unit has its own director, assistant, and 

 subordinate staff, and is equipped to accommodate the 

 individual student who contemplates pursuing some 

 special line of study abroad, or desires to work out 

 particular material collected abroad, or has some set 

 object of his own outside any participation in the 

 general laboratory course in which all the depart- 

 ments co-operate as before. By this arrangement, 

 which also permits a director or an assistant alterna- 

 tively to go abroad without disturbance of the home 

 routine, research in tropical medicine is doubly 

 seconded. The advanced or special student will also 

 benefit by the proximity of the Tropical Diseases 

 Bureau, which is now housed with the school, and is 

 about to permit a considerable part of its books and 

 serials to be incorporated, as a permanent loan, in a 

 common library. 



The changes thus briefly outlined, however, illus- 

 trate that inexorable concatenation of pain with 

 pleasure which supplied one of the texts of Socrates' 

 valedictory discourse ; for much as the school has 

 gained by its removal, it has lost — for the present, 

 whatever recompense mav lie in the womb of Time- — 

 the mess and all the concurrent social amenities which 

 graced its old home in the wilderness. 



New Experiments on the Inheritance of Somatogenic Modifications. 

 By Prof. Arthur Dendy, F.R.S. 



IT has long been suspected that the problem of the 

 transmission from parent to offspring of somato- 

 genic modifications ("acquired characters") might be 

 solved more readilv by physiological experiments 

 directlv involving the complex metabolism of the 

 body than by crude surgical 'operations such- as the 

 amputation of limbs. This suspicion has been 

 justified in a remarkable manner by the work of 

 Messrs. M. F. Guyer and E. .'\. Smith, recently 

 published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology 

 under the general title "Studies on Cytolysins." ' 

 The phvsiologists, through their brilliant investiga- 

 tions of serum reactions, have placed a whole armoury 

 of new weapons in the hands of the zoologist, and 

 have even furnished him with a chemical means of 

 determining the degree of relationship, and con- 

 sequ'^ntly the correct systematic position, of different 

 " species " of animals. We now have to thank them 

 for giving us a new means of approach to what is 

 perhaps the most difficult problem in biological 

 science. 



It has been known for some time that the injection 

 of for'-ign proteids into the blood of a vertebrate 

 animal calls forth a most profound physiological 

 response, and Messrs. Guyer and Smith riave taken 

 full -ndvnntage of this knowledge in devising their 

 exporirnents. Bordet showed a quarter of a conturv 

 ago thnt when the red corpuscles of the rabbit are 

 reneatediv iniected into the blood of the guinea-pig the 

 latter acquires the power of destroving them, and 

 serum prepared from these "sensitised" guinea-pigs 



' '* Some PrenaJal 'Effects of Lens Antib-Mtie " iJnu*-*t, Kx/>. Zoiti., 

 vol. xxvi.. Mav. '918^; "Transmission of Induced Eye Defects" (<?/. <://., 

 vol. xxxi . *uetist. 1020). 



NO. 2675, VOL. 106] 



will rapidly dissolve the red corpuscles of the rabbit 

 in vitro, while the serum of untreated guinea-pigs has 

 little or no effect. This experiment formed the com- 

 mencement of our knowledge of a whole class of 

 substances known as "cytolysins," which appear in 

 the blood as the appropriate " antibodies " in response 

 to the injection of such substances as red corpuscles, 

 leucocytes, nervous tissue, spermatozoa, and crvstal- 

 line lens, all of which, "when injected into the blood 

 of an unrelated species, will form lytic substances 

 more or less specific for the antigen used in the 

 sensitising process," the antigens being presumably 

 the characteristic proteids of the substances injected. 



The "antibody" or "antitoxin " may be produced 

 in large excess of the amount actually required to 

 destroy the injected foreign proteid, and a highly 

 sensitised serum may thus be obtained. It was with 

 such a serum, sensitised to the crystalline lens of the 

 rabbit, that Messrs. Guyer and Smith conducted their 

 experiments. The seruiji was prepared by grinding 

 up rabbits' lenses with normal salt solution and 

 injectinjj the fluid into fowls. .\ "lens-sensitised" 

 serum was thus obtained, i.e. a serum which would 

 dissolve the lens-substance of the rabbit. 



When this lens-sensitised serum is injected into 

 the veins of a pregnant rabbit the young exhibit ,-! 

 tendency to develop defective eyes — especially .ts 

 regards the lens, which may be more or less opaque 

 or liouefied. The eyes of the parent are not affected, 

 possibly because in the adult eye the blood-supplv 

 to the lens is so meagre that the sensitised serum 

 cannot reach it, or the adult lens may be too tough 

 to be affected bv minute quantities of the lysin. The 

 lens of the developing embryo, however, is a very 



