100 
injury in any organism is followed by responses mis- 
directed and always damaging; ‘‘ these misdirected 
perturbed responses are inflammation.’’. .. ‘“‘It is 
distinguished from repair, for it is a perturbation 
thereof.’”’ This theme is supported by a number of 
examples, principally derived from injuries, &c., in 
vegetable organisms. 
(3) In these Milroy lectures Dr. Hamer gives a 
brief but fascinating account of some of the plagues 
and pestilences that ravaged England and Europe 
during the early and Middle Ages, and attempts to 
unravel the nature of some of these. That principally 
dealt with is the ‘‘ sweating sickness,’’ a mysterious 
disease which appeared in England in 1485, and 
recurred again and again. By careful analysis this 
disease is proved to be epidemic influenza. A con- 
sideration of the records of measles and of small-pox 
leads to the conclusion that these two diseases have 
maintained a wonderful fixity of character. 
(4) This book should usefully serve the purpose for 
which it is intended, viz. to give an account of 
microbial activity in relation to agriculture. The 
introduction on the morphology and classification of 
the bacteria is perhaps not altogether satisfactory, 
but the succeeding portions of the bool successfully 
epitomise the subjects of nitrification and denitrifi- 
cation, the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen by the 
agency of various micro-organisms, and the various 
industries dependent on microbial activity. Under the 
last heading the alcoholic, acetic, and lactic ferment- 
ations are dealt with at length, also bread and sugar 
making, ensilage, flax and tobacco manufacture, and 
tanning. The book thus gives a very complete 
account of fermentation processes, is illustrated with 
a number of figures, and can be cordially recom- 
mended. R. T. HEwWLeTrT. 
CAPTAINS OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY. 
Some Founders of the Chemical Industry: Men to be 
remembered. By T. Fenwick Allen. Pp. xxiii+ 
289. (Manchester and London: Sherratt and 
Hughes, 1906.) Price 5s. net. 
HIS book consists of a series of biographical 
sketches of men whose claim to remembrance is 
mainly based on their connection with the de- 
velopment of the great chemical industry of Lan- 
cashire and the North, viz., the manufacture of alkali 
and of the other chemical products which are directly 
associated with that industry. These sketches origin- 
ally appeared in the Chemical Trade Journal, and Mr. 
Allen has done wisely in putting them together and 
republishing them in book-form, and thereby render- 
ing them more readily accessible to all who are in- 
terested in the personal history of technology. 
The book deserves to be in the library of every 
polytechnic and technical school in the country. Al- 
though it deals with only a special branch of chemical 
industry, that branch, in point of magnitude and 
commercial value, is by far the most important of 
our chemical manufactures. The story of its rise 
and progress, as illustrated by the biographies of 
its founders, is one of the most interesting and 
fascinating chapters in the history of industry in 
NO. 1935, VOL. 75]| 
NATURE 
| NOVEMBER 29, 1906 
this country. Dr. Smiles has done much by bic 
graphical narrative to popularise what may be called | 
the romance of industry, and it cannot be doubted > 
that his works have served to fire the ambitions and 
to stimulate the endeavours of hundreds of earnest, 
thoughtful young men. But the life-history of his 
heroes, and the story of their struggles, their disap- 
pointments and successes, is not a whit more mar- 
vellous or more enthralling than the stories of such | 
men as Gossage, Gamble, Muspratt, Andreas Kurtz, 
or Henry Deacon. No chemical technologist—be he 
young or old—can rise from the perusal of even the 
most meagre account of their life-work without realis- 
ing that genius in chemistry is to be found as much 
| in its applications to the material benefit of mankind 
as in the elucidation of its scientific truths. 
The men who collectively founded and developed in 
this country the several manufactures which are com- 
prehended under what is known as the alkali trade 
sprang, for the most part, from the lower middle 
class. They were persons of very small means, im- 
perfectly educated, and with very little knowledge, to 
begin with, of chemistry. It is difficult, indeed, in 
some cases to discover why they should have turned 
their attention to chemical pursuits. Gossage was 
born in a small Lincolnshire town; Gamble was an 
ordained minister of the Presbyterian kirlk in Ennis- 
killen; Muspratt was also an Irishman—a rolling 
stone, who tried the army and then the navy, before 
he settled down to chemical manufacture; Deacon 
was a Londoner, and apprenticed to an engineering 
firm; Allhusen started life in the grain trade; and 
Peter Spence’s father was a hand-loom weaver in 
Brechin, who apprenticed him to a grocer. Not one 
of them was predisposed by the circumstances of his 
origin or home-life to take up chemistry, of -which 
science, indeed, he could have no knowledge until 
long after the age at which most young men nowa- 
days begin their life-work. Deacon’s bent may pos- 
sibly have been determined by his association, as a 
boy, with Faraday, but it is more than likely that 
it was the failure of the engineering firm to which 
he was apprenticed that changed the current of his 
life and made him a glass-maker at St. Helens. 
However different they might be in temperament, 
in habits of mind, and in intellectual tendencies—it is 
impossible to conceive, for example, two more sharply 
contrasted characters than James Muspratt and Peter 
Spence—all the men had certain gifts in common, 
chief among which were imagination and invention, 
pertinacity and resource, courage and self-reliance. 
Some of them, and not always the most talented, be- 
came wealthy; others, greatly daring, brought them- 
selves to the verge of ruin in what seemed at the 
time heroic but hopeless struggles with the vagaries 
of a chemical process. These men pursued chemical 
manufacturing with all the keenness of scientific in- 
vestigation, and wrestled with difficulties for the pure 
love of conquest. 
Mr. Allen tells the story of their hopes and disap- 
pointments, their failures and triumphs, and tells it 
very well. We heartily commend his book to all 
who are interested in industrial progress, and in parti- 
cular to chemical students who desire to know some- 
