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dCIENCU 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIII. No. 843 



not turn out a standardized product of 

 salable packages of information, but an 

 infinitely variable and intangible thing the 

 importance of which to the world can not 

 be measured by the demand for it reckoned 

 in dollars and cents. The world ultimately 

 owes far more to the institution which 

 produces men who guide the world's des- 

 tinies in any department of activity than 

 it does to the graduate factory that adds 

 yet more to the rank and file of the medi- 

 ocre. This at least is the situation regard- 

 ing the very class of institutions the in- 

 vestigation of which was undertaken in the 

 report before us. Its whole tenor was to lay 

 emphasis upon the destruction of the acad- 

 emic freedom and initiative that is necessary 

 to the advancement of human intelligence and 

 to promote that kind of organization which, 

 under the disguise of uniformity and system, 

 effectively suppresses progress. It is an appli- 

 cation to educational institutions of the meth- 

 ods too common in American manufacture, 

 which insure a large output of the tolerable 

 rather than a small output of the desirable. — 

 The Electrical World and Engineer. 



SOIENTIFIO BOOKS 



Theorie physico-chinvique de la vie et genera- 

 tions spontanees. Par Stephan Leddc, pro- 

 fesseur a I'ecole de medicine de ISTantes. 

 Paris, A. Poinat. 1910. 

 Life as a physico-chemical process, and the 

 analogy hetween living and lifeless, would 

 possibly have been a better heading for this 

 little book of Professor Leduc, for it does not 

 consider spontaneous generation in the fash- 

 ion which the reader is apt to expect from its 

 title. On the other hand, it may well be that 

 the post-Pasteurean biologist is over-sensitive 

 as to the words " spontaneous generation," 

 and he is apt to give them in latter days a 

 cabalistic meaning: he inclines to dismiss the 

 rare papers which deal with the theme as 

 anachronisms — and he is careful not to recom- 

 mend them to publishers. Even the French 

 Academy has become so modern that it will 

 not admit to its shelves any treatise which 

 deals with this " exploded theory " ! 



Nevertheless, a whisper comes occasionally 



out of the wilderness and reminds us that this 

 is the problem of all biological problems and 

 that it is still neglected. Perhaps our con- 

 science is touched by the feeling that if we 

 are consistent evolutionists we must have some 

 manner of faith that the living came from the 

 lifeless, and that, in the pursuit of biological 

 happiness, we have been drifting in past years 

 towards vitalism in some type or another. 

 We recall too, that in the last decade, steps 

 have been taken in the analysis of biochemical 

 phenomena, in matters of enzymes, catalyzers, 

 ions, tonicity and similar physical facts which 

 have all an intimate bearing upon organisms 

 and are paving the way for a new biological 

 era. After all, many of us are convinced 

 mechanists, and there should therefore be no 

 reason why a book like Leduc's, title and all, 

 should not be welcomed. It is certainly the 

 first work to bring up to date the documents 

 upon which a synthetic biology — as distin- 

 guished from descriptive and analytical — may 

 be founded. 



Let us see how his theme is handled : There 

 is as yet no satisfactory definition of life: in 

 spite of the efforts of many biologists, we 

 know it by its presence or absence, by phe- 

 nomena of nutrition, sensibility, growth, or- 

 ganization, reproduction, processes all of 

 which are known in some degree in the inor- 

 ganic. Moreover, as Leduc declares, life is in 

 itself different in quality in its different mani- 

 festations in various organisms ; thus he leads 

 us to infer that the life of man differs more 

 widely from the life of a protozoan than the 

 life of the protozoan from the " life " of liquid 

 crystals, for example. Life is to be studied as 

 the transformer of matter and energy, it is a 

 specialized phase of matter, the organic as 

 opposed to the inorganic, and like a current it 

 changes ephemerally. Its expression can best 

 be studied in nutrition and in morphogenesis. 

 And these are the lines of study which the 

 author has developed. Nutrition is in essence 

 chemico-physical, especially concerned with 

 the phenomena. of contacts between fluids of 

 different characters, whether electrolytic, os- 

 motic, colloidal, crystalloidal. In this con- 

 nection he considers the laws of solutions, 



