Mabch 19, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



461 



hundred professors, more or less, as many 

 gymnasium drill masters. Let us suppose that 

 the resultant multitude were called a univer- 

 sity. It would be just the same sort of a uni- 

 versity we have developed in America, a place 

 where men and boys are gathered together, 

 each in the other's way, and where neither 

 ideals of scholarship nor ideals of man-making 

 can reach their most perfect achievement. — 

 President David Starr Jordan, in The Yale 

 News. 



SGIENTIFW BOOKS 

 Conditions of Life in the Sea. A Short Ac- 

 count of Quantitative Marine Biological 

 Eesearch. By James Johnstone. Pp.332. 

 Cambridge Biological Series, Cambridge 

 University Press. 1908. 

 Many good things must be, and a few bad 

 things ought to be, said about this book. 

 Since it is more agreeable to speak well than 

 ill, we will occupy ourselves first and chiefly 

 with what is good. 



The broader value of the work is two fold. 

 In the first place it affords an easy, reliable 

 opening into an important, rapidly growing 

 field of knowledge that hitherto has not been 

 readily accessible to general readers, nor in- 

 deed to special scientific students. The field 

 to which reference is made is marine biology 

 as developed particularly by the countries 

 bordering on the North Sea. Many profes- 

 sional biologists, especially in America, have 

 not yet had brought home to them the funda- 

 mental nature of various conceptions and 

 methods involved in these investigations. 



In the second place the book is noteworthy 

 for biology generally from the consistency 

 with which the quantitative standpoint is 

 maintained. The reviewer does not recall 

 another semi-popular work in which organ- 

 isms are regarded in a quantitative way for 

 so wide a range of their relationships. In 

 this the book may be looked upon as a har- 

 binger of what biological treatises of general 

 character will be in the future. This state- 

 ment tells at once that the author is enrolled 

 in the so-called Hensen or Kiel school of ma- 

 rine biologists. 



Much criticism has been passed upon both 



the methods and results of this school. One 

 may be indeed justifiably sceptical concern- 

 ing the value of the particular calculation 

 that a square mile of the water of the Baltic 

 Sea contains 80 to 100 billion copepods, or 

 that there were 180,139,000 haddock in the 

 whole North Sea during the spring of 1895. 

 The chief interest in the calculation lies in 

 its significance concerning what biology's 

 attitude toward its problems may be. In a 

 given limited area of the ocean, the North 

 Sea for example, there is at a given time some 

 limited number of haddock. Finite quanti- 

 ties of substances and bodies and forces are 

 the very foundation stones of all physical 

 science, biology with the rest, and sooner or 

 later as knowledge advances, values for these 

 quantities are bound to be sought. When 

 fishing industries unite with clearly per- 

 ceived biological problems in demanding in- 

 formation as to how many herring there are 

 in the North Sea, and how much food is 

 available for them, to get such information 

 is exactly part of the business of science. If 

 the first attempts are not sufficiently reliable, 

 others with better methods must be made. 

 For biology to take the ground that such re- 

 searches can not be successful, nor would be 

 significant if they were, would be to acknowl- 

 edge itself stunted in its early youth. 



The book is divided into three parts. Part 

 I. designated introductory, contains in the 

 first place a general description of the appa- 

 ratus and procedures used in the most ad- 

 vanced marine biological researches. An ac- 

 count of certain aspects of oceanography is 

 also given as is a very general survey of the 

 Life of the Sea. Such topics as bottom de- 

 posits, composition, temperature, transparency 

 and circulation of the waters are touched 

 upon. 



Under the heading Life in the Sea the zones 

 of littoral life, bottom dwellersv or the benthos,, 

 and the free life, or the nekton and plankton, 

 and kindred subjects are spoken of and several 

 figures showing characteristic pelagic inverte- 

 brates and algse are given. This part ends 

 with a chapter on sea fisheries. 



The real essence of the volume is in parts 

 H. and III., designated respectively Quanti- 



