292 



NA TURE 



[July 26, 1906 



Vou may read this and that book, but on no account 

 are you to waste any time on any others ; you may 

 consult such and such original researches, but the 

 remainder are useless. We have no doubt that this 

 body would notify in the present instance that the 

 student of wireless telegraphy must confine his at- 

 tention to the books by Hertz and Dr. Fleming. We 

 ore not speaking of the student of electromagnetic 

 waves. In Dr. Fleming's book is to be found a 

 treatment of the subject which is exhaustive and 

 thorough both on the theoretical and practical sides. 

 It is a book which has been long wanted, and will 

 be warmly welcomed. 



One may notice, however, by a careful study of 

 the book that wireless telegraphy practice is still 

 to a certain extent tentative. The hest methods are 

 not yet decided upon, and methods differ because 

 there is still much ignorance. But there are signs 

 that the approach to more exact results is being 

 made with the advent of apparatus based on wider 

 knowledge and capable of allowing accurate measure- 

 ments. Just as telegraphy needed the development 

 of very special apparatus before full advantage could 

 be taken of its powers, so wireless telegraphy calls 

 for its own special apparatus. The process of de- 

 velopment is necessarily slow, but in our present state 

 of technical attainments it is sure. 



It is quite evident from the perusal of the books 

 before us that there is room in our complex civilisa- 

 tion both for ordinary telegraphy and wireless -tele- 

 graphy. There are very few new discoveries which 

 succeed in displacing old ones. We have room for 

 many technical developments, and are capable of using 

 .ill to their best advantages in the spheres for which 

 they are particularly suited. For telegraphy over 

 land there is little, if any, fear that wires will be dis- 

 placed. There is little fear either that for com- 

 munication between continent and continent the cable 

 will give way to the overgrown " antennae." Wireless 

 telegraphy has found its special sphere in communica- 

 tion with ships, and soon will succeed in bringing 

 us as close together at sea as we now are on land. 

 When we consider that any man in any civilised 

 country will be able to get into almost instant com- 

 munication with any other, either on land or sea, we 

 can realise something of the benefits conferred by 

 telegraphv with wires and without. 



Maurice Solomon. 



THEORETICAL BIOLOGY. 

 Les ProbUmes de la Vic. Part iii. La Fecondation 

 et I'Heredite. Bv Prof. Ermanno Giglio-Tos, 1905. 

 Pp. vii-l-iSg. Part ii. L'Ontogenese et ses Pro- 

 blemes. 1903.. Pp. 368; 36 figures. (Chez I'Auteur 

 h rUniversit^ de Cagliari.) 



IN the third volume of his treatise on the problems 

 of life. Prof. Giglio-Tos proposes to elucidate 

 all the puzzling problems of maturation, fertilisation, 

 and heredity in the light of a fundamental pheno- 

 menon which he calls " biomolecular addition." 

 Biologists, he tells us, have been too much pre- 

 occupied with the interpretation of particular chapters 

 NO. I 91 7, VOL. 74] 



in the history of the germ-cells, and have neglected 

 to inquire into the fundamental cause which unifies 

 the whole. They have reached partial interpretations, 

 usually "artificial and Ideological," of details, but 

 a connected general theory is lacking. They have 

 been like geologists interpreting the course of a river, 

 and ignoring gravitation. The unifying secret is 

 " biomolecular addition," which seems to mean the 

 power that the living molecule (whatever that may be) 

 has of adding to itself another molecule " so that the 

 biomolecule resulting from the addition has double 

 the number of atoms, and may, in consequence, divide 

 into two biomolecules similar to one or the other of 

 the added biomolecules." Thus a male biomolecule 

 and a female biomolecule (identified with paternal and 

 maternal biomolecules) may add together and then 

 divide into two biomolecules which are either male 

 or female. We do not profess to understand this, 

 though the author assures us that biomolecular addi- 

 tion is " nothing but a chemical reaction of the 

 greatest simplicity between the biomolecules consti- 

 tuting the genetic cells," and we regret that we do 

 not understand it, for we are told that " it suffices 

 to explain even in their minor details all the interest- 

 ing manifestations accompanying the function of 

 sexual reproduction." These are brave words, but the 

 author's " e.xplanation " seems to us far removed from 

 the present-day scope of biology, in Britain at least. 



The author cannot accept Weismann's theory of 

 germinal continuity, believing, on the contrary, that 

 the ancestors of the germ-cells become histologically 

 differentiated, like ordinary somatic cells, along 

 special lines of " monodic " development. At a 

 certain epoch — " the genetic moment " — however, they 

 come under the influence of special substances in 

 the internal milieu, and are shunted back on a sort 

 of return journey which brings them, or their de- 

 scendants rather, to or near their starting point of 

 resemblance to the parental ovum from which the\ 

 are by cell-lineage derived. If the germ-cells can 

 return perfectly to the state of the original fertilised 

 ovum, with its dual equipment of male and female 

 biomolecules, then parthenogenesis may occur. But 

 this complete return implies very favourable nutritive 

 conditions in the internal milieu, and, as a matter of 

 fact, what usually occurs after the " genetic moment " 

 is a process of internal biomolecular addition as the 

 result of which the male or the female biomolecules in 

 the germ-cells disappear, and two kinds of genetic 

 cells are differentiated (with female or male biomole- 

 cules respectively). Thus fertilisation is necessary to 

 restore the integral constitution of the original 

 parental ovum. " The primitive cause of sexuality 

 and of fertilisation is to be found in the phenomenon 

 of biomolecular addition." In a laboriously ingenious 

 fashion the author uses his key to read the mysterious 

 ciphers of maturation and fertilisation, and he find?- 

 that it unifies everything — hermaphroditism and 

 parthenogenesis, secondary sex characters, and the 

 rejuvenescence of infusorians. But we have not been 

 able to use his key, and his distinctions between prc- 

 genetic and metagenetic parts of the body, neuter and 

 sexual paragenetic cells, external and internal bio- 



