October 19, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



389 



tions, also expatiates upon non-essentials and 

 indiscriminately devotes a great deal of valu- 

 able space to detailed and minute descriptions 

 of ordinary experiments well known to every 

 physiologist and pharmacologist, conveying 

 the impression as if the methods taught by the 

 St. Louis school were the only and the best. 



The mass of unimportant details which are 

 crowded into the book is surprising and it is 

 doubtful whether they will prove profitable 

 even to the student. It is a truism that no 

 experimental science can be learned from a 

 text-book and it is inlierent in the nature of 

 experimental investigation that subordinate 

 details of various procedures have to be modi- 

 fied under various circumstances and condi- 

 tions. It is very doubtful, therefore, whether 

 pages of detailed description of every step in 

 a given experiment may lead to a better grasp 

 of its general features. Indeed, such didacti- 

 cism may endanger the principal purpose of 

 the exercise by diverting the student's atten- 

 tion from the main features of the problem. 

 Many minutife should be best left to the com- 

 mon sense of the experimenter, and will be 

 learned by the beginner on the first day he 

 spends in the laboratory. A single demon- 

 stration in the lecture room or the workshop 

 will teach the student more than a hundred 

 pages of detailed description. Tor this reason 

 long descriptions with illustrations of how to 

 tie an animal on the operating table and simi- 

 lar incidental and trite matters seem to us 

 trivial and entirely superfluous. Such direc- 

 tions might possibly be found useful by a self- 

 made pharmacologist on an isolated island — 

 a Robinson Crusoe with pharmacological tend- 

 encies — with no one to guide him, but are 

 needless and purposeless in a country where 

 good teachers are to be found and well- 

 equipped laboratories are accessible. 



The title " Experimental Pharmacology " 

 as applied to the present work seems to one 

 familiar with pharmacological text-books to 

 be somewhat misleading. One unconsciously 

 expects to find a work along the lines of the 

 " Experimentelle Pharmakologie " of Meyer 

 and Gottlieb, namely, a logical presentation of 

 important pharmacological facts based upon 



the best modern experimental data. Jackson's 

 book is in reality a laboratory manual which 

 aims to present pharmacological deductions in 

 connection with typical experiments described 

 by the author. This fact explains best the 

 rather one-sided character of the work, for in 

 presenting the subject the author has laid the 

 greatest stress upon the experiments in which 

 he is an adept, and along the lines in which he 

 has been personally interested. Thus, for in- 

 stance, the whole group of heavy metals (iron, 

 mercury, arsenic, etc.) is practically un- 

 touched in the text-book: they are not even 

 mentioned in the index. On the other hand, 

 the comparatively unimportant minor element 

 or metal, vanadium, vnth which the author has 

 done some work, receives considerably more 

 attention than it deserves. 



An extraordinary feature of Jackson's 

 " Pharmacology " is its wealth of illustra- 

 tions. The book is listed to contain 536 pages, 

 including 390 illustrations. As many of the 

 cuts are full-page, the drawings occupy about 

 half of the book. Some of these are well exe- 

 cuted and should prove extremely useful. This 

 is especially the case with the reproductions of 

 careful and complicated dissections and vari- 

 ous schematic illustrations of nerves, blood 

 vessels and other structures with which the 

 book abounds. Furthermore, the drawings of 

 new and original methods for studying circu- 

 lation, pulmonary pressure, anesthesia, etc., 

 will also be found of help. The diagram of 

 the involuntary nervous system (p. 385), how- 

 ever, is not as lucid and explicit as that of 

 Langley or the modifications of the latter to be 

 found in Meyer and Gottlieb's "Pharmacol- 

 ogy." A large number of kymographic trac- 

 ings are also a distinctive feature of the book, 

 but here again the author's personality is per- 

 haps unduly accentuated by their selection. 

 Thus we have noted some twenty or more 

 tracings scattered promiscuously throughout 

 the book, which illustrate broncho-constric- 

 tion and broncho-dilatation, a method of ex- 

 perimentation for which the author has become 

 well known. While many of the illustrations 

 are well chosen and instructive, a large num- 

 ber may be found interspersed among them 



