August 7, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



211 



of lesser texts -whicli have been issued of late 

 to meet the growing demand for a usable sum- 

 mary for purposes of instruction, to see how 

 large a use has been made in them of old fig- 

 ures which have done duty for decades in 

 older texts, and to be impressed with the wealth 

 of unutilized materials when reference is 

 made to original sources. The time and care 

 needed in the preparation of new illustrations 

 and publishers' reluctance to risk the expense 

 of new cliches and of colored plates is doubt- 

 less responsible in part for this situation. 



The atlas in hand is far removed from any 

 such criticism, for the thirteen hundred fig- 

 ures on the forty-five colored lithographed 

 plates are from original colored drawings by 

 Professor Neumann, and the publisher has 

 spared neither pains nor expense to insure 

 adequate reproduction, more than twenty 

 colors being employed in some of the plates to 

 bring out satisfactory results. The extensive 

 collections of the Institut fiir Schiffs- und 

 Tropenkrankheiten at Hamburg have fur- 

 nished much of the original material upon 

 which the work is founded. Authors have also 

 contributed their original preparations for the 

 preparation of the illustrations. For example, 

 Looss, of Cairo, has contributed hookworm and 

 BcMstosomum material, Manson filaria, Prow- 

 azek trachoma, and Chagas his Brazilian 

 Schizotrypanum, the causative agent of the 

 South American " sleeping sickness." Japan, 

 Ceylon, Cairo, Congo, Nigeria, Brazil, the 

 Schools of Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, 

 Liverpool and their outposts in the tropics 

 have contributed richly to the resources util- 

 ized in this work. 



It has been the aim of the authors to in- 

 clude all forms of clinical importance and 

 such other related forms as are of theoretical 

 interest. The work was instituted in 1905, but 

 the growth of the subject has been so rapid 

 that its publication has been delayed, with the 

 result that the work has been greatly en- 

 riched by recent discoveries. Obviously no 

 book of even the sumptuous form of this atlas 

 could be expected to be encyclopedic. A vast 

 deal of elimination of detail, of selection of 

 material which has passed to the stage of rea- 



sonable certainty, and the omission of that of 

 more problematical status has been essential. 

 The authors have been very skilful in this re- 

 spect, though one questions their inclusion of 

 Prowazek's figure of " conjugation " in Try- 

 panosoma, for it would seem that the evidence 

 for sexual reproduction in the trypanosomes 

 is as yet inconclusive. 



The book unites the fields of zoology and 

 medicine and has been written with both in 

 view, though naturally many details of syste- 

 matic, cytological and anatomical nature are 

 eliminated, or presented only in condensed 

 form. On the other hand, life-histories of the 

 parasite and its carrier-host, and the patholog- 

 ical conditions which it induces, are subject to 

 both discussion and illustration. 



The structure of the elements of normal 

 blood is very fully illustrated and the tech- 

 nique of hematology is elaborated and methods 

 of staining, preservation, culture, collecting 

 and sending parasitological material are de- 

 tailed, usually with figures illustrative of appa- 

 ratus and method. Eeferences to literature 

 are well chosen and ample. Considerably more 

 than half of the work is given to the Protozoa 

 and to their invertebrate hosts, the flies, mos- 

 quitoes, bugs and ticks, five plates being de- 

 voted to trypanosomes and no less than five to 

 the malarial parasite. It is perhaps because 

 of this wealth of protozoological illustration 

 that one gets the impression that the parasites 

 belonging to the higher phyla, the worms and 

 arthopods, have received, relatively to their 

 importance, less ample treatment. But to have 

 done more would have inevitably necessitated 

 a second volume. It also seems that the para- 

 sitic flagellates, other than trypanosomes, and 

 ciliates call for fuller treatment than has been 

 accorded them. 



While the emphasis is placed upon human 

 parasites, the treatment is not restricted to 

 them; the additions, however, are more by way 

 of biological inclusiveness than for the pur- 

 poses of comparative medicine. The work can 

 hardly serve the purposes of the veterinarian, 

 though indispensable in all fields of parasitol- 

 ogy. 



The authoritative character of the work, the 



