10 



NA TURE 



[June 13, 1907 



now recognised that dosage is not to be measured by 

 bulli. How far we liave travelled from the older 

 doctrine may be appreciated on reading such state- 

 ments as the following : — " in very dilute solutions 

 the salt molecules are supposed to be held in solution 

 almost entirely in a state of dissociation, as ions " 

 (p. 319); and "It must be confessed, however, that 

 minute quantities . . . apparently too insignificant 

 to deserve mention, may ultimately turn out to have 

 a real importance " (p. 327). 



The selection and employment of baths in chronic 

 disorders belong mainly to the spa physician. The 

 present volume contains much suggestive material, 

 but there is still room for a good practical treatise 

 on the use of baths by a practising balneologist. 

 The need for an " after-cure " in all serious cases is 

 here very properly insisted upon. It may be safely 

 affirmed that the failure of health-resort treatment is 

 due in most cases either to the neglect of the " after- 

 cure " or else to the common error of indulgence 

 in a too prolonged course of baths, or in baths at too 

 high a temperature. The valuable place of suh- 

 thermal baths, given at temperatures below blood 

 heat, has never been sufficiently emphasised as a mode 

 of treatment at all the spas. 



The discussion of the indications for climatic and 

 spa treatment in the closing chapters should be of 

 service to all those who have to do with the selection 

 of a health resort. 



THE CORAL POKITES. 

 Catalogue of the Madreborarian Corals in the British 

 Museum (Natural History). Vol. vi.. The Family 

 Poritidae, ii.. The Genus Porites, Part ii. By 

 H. M. Bernard. Pp. vi+173. (London: Printed 

 by Order of the Trustees of the British Museum, 

 1906.) Price 20s. 



WITH the publication of the second volume of 

 the Poritidae it may be said that Mr. Bernard's 



•system of cataloguing the corals in the British 

 Museum has been given a fair trial. A great deal of 



■skilled labour has been devoted to this work, and a 



:great deal of money has been spent upon it. It is 

 therefore right that the merits of the system itself 



■should be re-considered in the light of the results 

 obtained. 



That the catalogue is of some value no one would 

 be disposed to deny. We have now, not only a record 

 of the existence of a number of specimens of corals 

 in the British Museum, but a careful, detailed account 

 of their form of growth and skeletal characters. 

 For those whose business it is to catalogue or study 

 certain genera of corals, it is now possible to ascer- 

 tain, without making a special journey to London 

 for the purpose, that their specimens are similar to 

 others in the possession of the British Museum. 

 Students of coral structure have, moreover, the 

 advantage of considering the general remarks on the 

 variation in the mode of growth, of the arrangement 

 of the septa, pali. Sic, made by an 'authority who has 



;had a very large number of specimens to examine. 

 But Mr. Bernard has abandoned the time-honoured 

 NO. 1963, VOL, 76] 



plan of arranging his specimens in groups of species 

 and has adopted the system of ticketing each speci- 

 men with the name of the locality in which it was 

 found and a meaningless number. Thus the speci- 

 men in Ihe Paris Museum, which has for nearly a 

 hundred years been known as the type of Porites 

 clavaria, Lamarck, is recorded in the British Museum 

 catalogue as Porites aniericana incertae sedis secunda. 



It is true that the attempt to apply the Linnean 

 system to the Madreporaria and other orders of 

 Coelenterata is beset with many very great difficulties. 

 Everyone who has worked at the systematic zoology 

 of these animals has met these difficulties, and has 

 probably realised that in the present state of know- 

 ledge his solution of them is crude and unsatisfactory. 

 But we are still in the early period of the history of 

 coral morphology, and until our knowledge of the 

 anatomy of the coral polyps, of their tentacles, of 

 their mesenteries, of their mesenteric filaments, and 

 of other features of their anatomy is considerably 

 extended, we are not in a position to conclude that thi 

 Linnean system is not applicable to them. Th' 

 advantage of using the Linnean system, however, 

 even in the present state of knowledge, is that it , 

 enables the naturalist who has made a special study of 

 a genus to express his opinion, by the arrangement of 

 the specimens into specific groups, of the relations he 

 believes they bear to one another. His opinion may 

 not be sound, it may even prove to be misleading, 

 but the stimulus it gives him to careful and accurate 

 observation is the very soul of his work, and alone 

 gives life to systematic zoology. I 



In Mr. Bernard's catalogues we find simply a bald 

 statement of facts. There are descriptions and figures 

 of specimens, there are tables and lists, but there 

 is. not one word concerning the thoughts or opinions 

 of the man who has devoted so considerable a part 

 of a lifetime to the collection of these facts. It is 

 like a quantity surveyor's estimate of bricks and 

 stones without an architect's plan of the building 

 they are to construct. We do not get in this system 

 what we might expect to get, the benefit of tin- 

 author's long experience, and, on the other hand, for 

 those who would follow him in the systematic zoology 

 of corals his volumes oifer nothing but discourage- 

 ment. 



The time has come when a new line of research 

 should be undertaken, namely, a systematic study of 

 the soft parts of a large number of specimens of 

 some one genus such as Porites, and a comparison 

 made of the relation of the anatomy of the zooids to 

 the different forms of skeletal growth. In this in- 

 vestigation some of Mr. Bernard's tables may prove 

 useful, but the naturalist will have to go through a 

 great deal of the work again in order to make the 

 record valuable for systematic purposes. Such a 

 study may achieve a great deal in clearing up the 

 difficulty of distinguishing between characters that 

 are intrinsic and transmitted by heredity to successive 

 generations and characters that are due to the 

 immediate influence of the environment. It may 

 indicate to us the characters that are of value and 

 those that are not of value for purposes of classifi- 



