OCTOBEE 26, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



409 



tana State University, filling the place of A. 

 W. L. Bray, who is taking advanced work at 

 Harvard University this year. 



W. F. LusK, formerly of the department of 

 rural education in the University of Minne- 

 sota, has accepted a position as professor of 

 rural education in Cornell University. 



Dr. Thomas Byrd Maoath (Ph.D., Ulinois) 

 has been appointed instructor in anatomy in 

 the medical college of the University of Illi- 

 nois, Chicago. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 



REPLY TO DR. BLEILE 



Dr. Bleile, in his reply^ to my criticism 

 of hia paper on the "Role of Boyle's law in 

 clinical sphygmomanometry,"^ takes me to 

 task, as I see it, on account of iowc scores. 



The first is that I criticised an " abstract " 

 of his paper. He does not make it clear that 

 this " abstract " was written by himself and 

 was published in the American Journal of 

 Physiology. Nor does he make it clear that it 

 has been abstracted in Physiological Abstracts 

 in the form that is accorded to all papers. My 

 criticism, therefore, is of statements that have 

 been put on record in two publications. 



The second count is personal : to this I will 

 not reply. 



The third count is that I " completely " 

 missed the point of his paper. I take it that 

 he here refers to my understanding of his 

 statement of Boyle's law in comparison with 

 mine, which, as I say in my criticism, led me 

 "to suppose that in my application of Boyle's 

 law I have committed the mistake of making 

 the relation between pressure and volume a 

 direct instead of an inverse one." If Dr. 

 Bleile did not intend to give this impression, 

 he had the opportunity of saying so in his 

 reply; but on this subject he remains silent. 

 This is to be regretted all the more, because 

 Physiological Abstracts makes exactly the 

 same interpretation as I made. The whole 

 abstract^ there consists of this sentence : 



1 Science, N. S., XL VI., Ill, 1917. 



2 Science, N. S., XLV., 384, 1916. 

 s Physiol. Abstr., II., 176. 



It is shown that the oscillations of pressure and 

 volume always vary inversely, as required by 

 Boyle's law, and contrary to what is implied in 



Erlanger's hypothesis. 



In the fourth count he accuses me of chang- 

 ing somewhat radically some of the statements 

 of my own paper. If this accusation refers 

 to my quotations, I can only say that they are 

 absolutely verbatim. If it refers to my " para- 

 phrase," I must leave it to others, who are 

 sufficiently interested to take the time to com- 

 pare it with the original, to decide whether 

 the sense of my original statement is altered 

 in it. 



The major part of Dr. Bleile's " Reply " 

 consists of a painstaking mathematical proof 

 of the admission clearly made in my " Reply," 

 that 



I inadvertently employed . . . the pressures 

 taken directly from the mercury manometer in- 

 stead of the absolute pressures. 



He here, therefore, proves, as I say in my 

 criticism, that " the failure to express the 

 pressure in absolute terms affects . . . only the 

 magnitude of the change, not its sign." And 

 if the sign is not changed, my thesis is sub- 

 stantiated, for, to repeat. 



My only object in invoking Boyle's law was to 

 show that under the particular set of ideal condi- 

 tions premised . . . the amplitude of the pressure 

 oscillations, resulting from the filling and empty- 

 ing of the artery, must increase as the compressing 

 pressure increases from the diastolic to close to the 

 systolic level. 



Since my criticism was written. Dr. Bleile's 

 full report has appeared.* In it he makes ad- 

 ditional criticisms of my work, which likewise 

 are practically irrelevant to the purpose of my 

 paper or are made possible through conditions 

 gratuitously imposed. I will discuss one of 

 these criticisms in order to indicate their na- 

 ture. Dr. Bleile says: 



Erlanger's deductions are: If a pressure now 

 equal to the diastolic be applied during the dias- 

 tolic phase in the artery, no oscillations will be pro- 

 duced in the manometer during the pulsations of 

 inside arterial pressure. For, he [Erlanger] 

 argues, if the inside pressure rises above the dias- 



* Amer. Jour. Physiol., 1917, XLIII., 475. 



