?86 



NA rURE 



[February 23, 1905 



Mr. Fletcher, the book he has now given us is 

 eminently characteristic, full of his own energetic, 

 practical activity, his love of health, fresh air, and 

 good exercise. 



" When I began," he tells us, " I had foolish hopes 

 that it might be a book some boys would take up 

 for amusement, but I soon discovered that twenty- 

 three years of teaching had made it impossible for 

 me to do more than smear the powder with a thin 

 layer of jam. We cannot render our dreams of the 

 past (however convinced we may be of their truth) 

 into an intelligible consecutive story." 



Here, it seems to us, there is both truth and un- 

 truth. Mr. Fletcher's story is, in the main, highly 

 intelligible and adequately consecutive (though one 

 may make an exception of the Anglo-Saxon period, 

 where the author seems at times almost to sink 

 to Milton's notions of "kites and crows"); but 

 how can any true student regard English history as 

 if it were a nauseous drug, to be made palatable by 

 some device? Should one not rather look at it as 

 a storehouse from which a good judgment is needed 

 to draw forth those treasures best suited to the 

 audience one addresses — to the specialist this, to 

 the general reader that, to the working man one 

 thing, to the merchant, the professional man, or the 

 politician another? 



Yet though Mr. Fletcher anxiously disclaims the 

 idea of pouring information into anyone, and still 

 more anxiously repudiates the ambition of helping 

 anybody to pass any examination, he has certainly 

 given us here a sketch of living men by a living 

 man, and everyone who is not a pedant, everyone 

 who desires to remember that history is the life- 

 record of humanity, will be grateful to him for this 

 book. Peculiarly interesting is the picture attempted 

 of an imaginary village in pre-Norman, Norman, and 

 post-Norman times, with its three fields, for wheat, 

 barley, and pasture, its arable strips, its green 

 common or waste, its water-meadows, its pig-grazing 

 woods, its no-man's land, and its bull-croft — as 

 successful an attempt to realise the township-manor 

 as any popular treatise has supplied in English of 

 recent years ; while a word must also be said in 

 praise of the capital little chapter of geological 

 histon,', illustrated by a serviceable map of N.W. 

 Europe in the Old Stone age, with which Mr. 

 Fletcher commences. 



Mr. Chadwick's " Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institu- 

 tions " supplies a useful corrective to the studied vague- 

 ness with which Mr. Fletcher treats our English 

 history. Here a careful re-examination of the 

 evidence bearing on some of the most interesting 

 problems of early English history and sociology is 

 attempted with distinct success. The writer's object 

 has especially been to call attention to those branches 

 of the subject which have hitherto suffered from 

 comparative neglect. Thus he has dealt very lightly 

 witii Mercian and Northumbrian history because he 

 had nothing of importance to add to previous "work ; 

 but evidence relating to Kent, Sussex, Essex, and the 

 Hwiccas has been reviewed and re-stated with great 

 care, and with the belief that some fresh results have 

 been attained. The most valuable portion of the 

 NO. 1843, VOL. 7 1] 



volume seems to be that dealing with the old English 

 monetary system (accompanied by a useful e.xcursus 

 on Frankish coinage, pp. 1-75). And next to this 

 the reader may be recommended to the chapters deal- 

 ing with the history of the older counties (Kent, 

 &c., pp. 269-307) and with the origin of the nobility 

 (pp. 378-411). Great caution marks all Mr. Chad- 

 wick's work, and this quality is never more 

 useful than in such a difficult period as the Anglo- 

 Saxon. But his treatment of our early charters is 

 also noticeable for its courage; when, even in 

 obviously spurious documents, names and titles other- 

 wise unknown are met with, the author, with a 

 daring that will perhaps greatly shock some 

 dogmatists, ventures to think that such names and 

 titles are not necessarily products of imagination. 

 To find one who will say this, and who will appeal 

 moreover for a fairer hearing in the examination of 

 j tradition, popular as well as ecclesiastical, is certainly 

 refreshing at the present moment. 



STEREOCHEMISTR Y. 

 Materialien der Stereochcmie. (In Form von Jahres- 

 berichten.) Band i., 1894-1898; Band ii., 1899-1902. 

 By C. h. Bischoff. Pp. cxxxvi+ig77. (Bruns- 

 wick : Vieweg and Son, 1904.) Price 90 marks. 

 IN the course of his reply to a letter from the 

 Chemical Society of London congratulating him 

 on the completion of the twenty-fifth year of his. 

 doctorate, Prof. Emil Fischer writes as follows : — 



" The time when the fundamental principles of 

 our science were laid down, and when it was possible 

 for the individual investigator to stamp the impress 

 of his own mind upon it, is long since past, and irt 

 the gigantic structure, which it now represents, each 

 fellow-worker can only finish some small fragment, 

 or it may be, if he is fortunate, a pretty balcony or 

 a striking turret." 



The two ponderous tomes, in which Prof. Bischoff 

 records the advances made in stereochemistry from 

 1894 to 1902, illustrate in a very striking manner this 

 ever-increasing tendency to specialism in chemical 

 research, which Fischer emphasises in the sentence 

 just quoted. 



Although Pasteur, in i85i, by his classical experi- 

 ments with the isomeric tartaric acids, may be said 

 to have laid the foundation of stereochemistry, the 

 growth of this branch of chemical science was at first 

 slow, since it was not till 1873 that Wislicenus- 

 pointed out as a consequence of his work with lactic 

 acid that differences between compounds of identical 

 structure must be ascribed to differences in the spaciat 

 arrangement of their atoms within the molecule. 

 The publication in the following year by van't Hoff 

 and Le Bel of their theory of the asymmetric carboni 

 atom gave an immense impulse to experimental work, 

 so that optically active compounds, which in tliose 

 earlier days were numbered by tens, may now be 

 counted by thousands. 



The rapid development of stereochemistry is not, 

 however, restricted to the field of optically active 

 compounds. The researches of Victor Meyer and of 

 Bischoff are fundamental in that branch where the 



