April 22, 1920] 



NATURE 



?25 



more. Troubles continued ; mice and floods did 

 great' damage, and not until 183b did prosperity 

 come ; from that time on, however, the tale is one 

 of steady and increasing progress. 



Space does not allow of quotations from Prof. 

 Buller's description of modern wheat growing in 

 western Canada, but this is less necessary since 

 it is more generally known than the earlier 

 history. While it has less human interest, the 

 tale is still a fascinating record of what can be 

 achieved by intelligent organisation. 



Another essay is devoted to the Red Fife and 

 Marquis wheats. Red Fife* was introduced into 

 Canada some sixty years ago, and by reason of its 

 sterling merit and great suitability to Canadian 

 conditions it spread far and wide, doing much 

 to make Canada's reputation as a wheat-producing 

 country. The farmer is rarely a writer, and David 

 Fife, who raised the first crop about the year 1842, 

 has himself left no record of how he did it. But, 

 though written contemporary records are lacking, 

 oral traditions are abundant ; some of them are 

 reproduced by Prof. Buller, and they can almost 

 be graded in point of time by their respective 

 wealth of picturesque detail. The earliest written 

 record is in the Canadian Agriculturist for March, 

 1861. It is there related that David Fife, of 

 Otonabee, Ontario, in 1842 procured from a friend 

 in Glasgow a quantity of wheat drawn from a 

 cargo coming direct from Danzig. The wheat 

 arrived in spring and some of it was sown forth- 

 with ; it failed to ripen, excepting only three heads, 

 which apparently sprang from a single grain. 

 These were preserved and the grain sown the next 

 year; the progeny did very well, escaping rust, 

 while all round the local wheat was badly infested. 

 Again the grain was harvested separately, and 

 gradually a large stock was worked up and dis- 

 tributed among other farmers. 



The Continental origin of Red Fife was definitely 

 established by Dr. Charles Saunders in 1904, 

 when he proved its complete identity with a 

 Galician spring wheat. 



Dr. William Saunders, the revered first organ- 

 iser of the experimental stations in Canada, whose 

 courtly bearing and distinguished kindliness will 

 always be remembered by those who knew him, 

 began soon after 1886 to make crosses between 

 Red Fife and other varieties with a view to im- 

 provement. One of the crosses actually made by 

 his son Arthur in 1892 was between Red Fife as 

 male and an early ripening Indian wheat. Hard 

 Red Calcutta, as female. Unfortunately, the 

 Indian wheat is a mixture, and the precise variety 

 used cannot now be determined. When Dr. 

 Saunders's second son Charles became Dominion 

 NO. 2634, VOL. 105] 



Cerealist, he made a careful examination of the 

 progeny of this cross^ and selected from the mass 

 of material one strain of outstanding excellence, 

 which he called "Marquis," and which, from a 

 single head in 1903, has spread over Canada and 

 the United States, until in igi8' it was sown on 

 20,000,000 acres of land and yielded some 

 300,000,000 bushels of grain. So wonderful a 

 rate of growth can scarcely have occurred before 

 in the whole history of the world. 



It is not often that a reviewer wishes a book 

 had been longer, but that is decidedly one's feeling 

 in closing this volume. One can only hope that 

 Prof. Buller will find time to give us more of 

 these delightful essays. E. J. Russell. 



The Fertilisation of the Ovum. 



Problems of Fertilization. By Prof. Frank 

 Rattray Lillie. (The University of Chicago 

 Science Series.) Pp. xii + 278. (Chicago, 111.: 

 The University of Chicago Press ; London : The 

 Cambridge University Press, 1919.) Price 

 1.75 dollars net. 



THE problem of fertilisation, of what really 

 happens when the spermatozoon meets the 

 ovum, and of how the latter is incited to begin the 

 long series of rhythmical cleavages that finally 

 result in a new organism,, is one of the most 

 interesting and at the same time one of the rnost 

 complex in biological science. From the time of 

 Aristotle, who held that "the female always 

 supplies the matter, the male the power of crea- 

 tion," the problem has engaged the attention of 

 biological philosophers, and no doubt it will con- 

 tinue to do so for generations to come, for the 

 more it is investigated the more intricate it 

 becomes, and each new theory, evolved under the 

 influence of new experimental methods, is dis- 

 carded in turn as our knowledge of facts increases. 

 Not the least interesting part of Prof. Lillie 's 

 book is the historical survey with which it opens. 

 The discovery of the spermatozoon by Leeuwen- 

 hoek and Hamm in 1677 was epoch-making for 

 biological science, and, of course, was rendered 

 possible only by the advent of the compound 

 microscope. Like all other great discoveries, it 

 was immediately followed by sensational nonsense, 

 and we find "a certain Dr. Dalen Patius " claim- 

 ing that the human body is actually visible iti 

 perfect miniature within the spermatozoon ! This 

 grotesque view, however, was but an- extrenqe 

 form of that held by the spermatist scJiool in 

 general, which maintained that the ovum plays no 

 other part in the production of the young animal 

 than that of furnishing the germ contained in the 

 spermatozoon with nourishment. 



