June 1, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



567 



ber of points of discussion — these are the 

 points which make a popular text for students. 

 De Fiu-sac and Eosanoff's book has gained a 

 well-deserved place with medical students 

 through these qualifications, and it will de- 

 serve it even more fully in the present form. 

 Up to the present edition the text kept apart 

 the translation and the translator's annota- 

 tions. This distinction has been obliterated 

 and in reality the book has been adapted much 

 more definitely to the needs of the American 

 student, at least in the chapters entitled " The 

 Practise of Psychiatry," which give a helpful 

 picture of the present-day dispensary and 

 state hospital practise. 



The book represents a somewhat extraor- 

 dinary combination in view of the fact that it 

 is primarily an adaptation of the German 

 psychiatry to a French public and then a re- 

 adaptation to the American viewpoints. 

 French psychiatry has in the meantime shown 

 some evidences of revolt and repudiation, and 

 American psychiatry, if we can speak in such 

 a summary way, shows signs of a considerable 

 degree of emancipation. For the purposes of 

 the student, however, it is most important that 

 he get some reasonably clarified starting point, 

 and with the qualifications of the original 

 description by Eosanoff, the transition is made 

 reasonably easy and will no doubt offer a good 

 basis for further emancipation as further edi- 

 tions will demand it. It may be possible to 

 eliminate some unnecessary evidences of trans- 

 lation such as the reference on page 21 to 

 Jean Muller, whom probably most of us know 

 as Johannes Mueller. 



" In the first part of the book, the chapters 

 dealing with etiology, history taking, methods 

 of examination, special diagnostic procedures, 

 general prognosis, prevalence of mental dis- 

 orders, prevention, and medico-legal questions, 

 and, in the second part, those dealing with 

 Huntington's chorea, cerebral syphilis, and 

 traumatic psychoses are either wholly new or 

 almost so. 



" The chapter on general therapeutic indi- 

 cations, in the first part of the book, and those 

 on dementia prsecox, chronic alcoholism, gen- 

 eral paresis, and mental disorders due to 



organic cerebral affections, in the second part, 

 have been more or less extensively revised or 

 added to." 



Eosanoff's standpoint with regard to hered- 

 ity is very strongly emphasized in the book to 

 the effect that he feels that " we are in a posi- 

 tion to say to the people and to legislatures: 

 Mental health is purchasable; the prevalence 

 of mental disorders can be reduced for com- 

 ing generations with the aid of dollars and 

 cents spent for segregation in this generation." 



For the problems of non-institutional care 

 it might be wrong to expect too much help 

 from a book. The problem of psychotherapy 

 is treated rather briefly, but is one of those 

 things that have to be learned from practise 

 and with the help of special literature. 



Adolf Meyer 



The Johns Hopkins Universitt 



SPECIAL ARTICLES 



A SUGGESTION REGARDING THE MECHANISM 



OF ONE-SIDED PERMEABILITY IN 



LIVING TISSUESi 



It is a familiar fact to physiologists that a 

 large proportion of living tissues display a 

 type of permeability markedly differing from 

 the permeability or semipermeability of the 

 majority of non-living membranes in that it 

 is dependent upon direction, that is, upon the 

 side of the membrane exposed to the dissolved 

 substance. Among the almost numberless 

 illustrations of this phenomenon which might 

 be adduced it will be sufficient to cite the ex- 

 periment of Cohnheim^ in which a glucose 

 solution, free from sodiiun chloride was intro- 

 duced into an isolated loop of intestine. After 

 the lapse of a certain period investigation of 

 the residual fluid showed that while some fifty 

 per cent, of the water and glucose had passed 

 through the wall of the intestine into the blood 

 stream, only an insignificant trace of sodium 

 chloride had passed from the blood stream 

 into the glucose solution. This is not the 



1 From the department of biochemistry, Kudolph 

 Spreekels Physiological Laboratory, University of 

 California. 



2 O. Cohnheim, Zeitschrift f. Biologie, 36 (1898), 

 p. 129. 



