July 16, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



91 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 Vorlesungen iiber allgemeine Histologie ge- 



halten an der Hochschule fur Frauen in St. 



Petersburg. Von Alexander Gurwitsch. 



Jena, Gustav Fischer, 1913. Pp. vi + 345. 



204 figs. 



Professor Gurwitsch has taken seriously his 

 task of instructing the college women of 

 Petrograd. He has prepared for them a course 

 so philosophical that if adopted for American 

 young men, the audience would be restive, if 

 not more disrespectful. But he appreciates 

 that he is not dispensing milk for babes, and 

 quotes Helmholtz that the academic teacher 

 should always be mindful of this — that among 

 his hearers there are perhaps " die besten 

 Kopfe" of the next generation, and they are 

 to be reckoned with. Accordingly he presup- 

 poses an " elementary zoological, anatomical 

 and botanical knowledge" on the part of his 

 students, and correctly infers that his work 

 " perhaps makes greater demands upon the 

 attention of the reader than many another 

 compendium of histology." For this the reader 

 is amply rewarded. 



The first of the twenty-two lectures deals 

 ■with " the position of histology in the system 

 of the biological sciences." In this abstract 

 consideration, histology is shown to be far re- 

 moved from a naive, automatically-recording 

 science, limited only by optical and technical 

 difficulties. Its real difficulties are those of 

 subjective interpretation, and the author ranks 

 it high among the various attempts to secure 

 a better understanding of vital phenomena. 

 But he emphasizes the fact that the study of 

 structure is only one method of approach 

 among many which are available, and "we do 

 not know how far toward the goal it can lead 

 us." 



Each subject discussed in the lectures is 

 introduced with the formulation of a biolog- 

 ical problem. Thus the second lecture — on 

 " the fundamental conceptions of microscopic 

 morphology " — ^begins with the statement that 

 the first and most urgent problem is the end- 

 less multiplicity of forms which organisms 

 present. Can all organisms be regarded as 



various arrangements of one or a few sorts of 

 structural elements? It is then shown that 

 the Protista, from the simplest amebse and 

 bacteria to the highly organized infusoria, 

 appear irreducible. They show an essential 

 agreement only in the " heterogeneity of their 

 architecture." But such forms as the hydroid 

 polyps, the vegetative buds of Equisetum and 

 embryos of the higher animals, are composed 

 of elements, or cells, which show many more 

 interrelationships and analogies among them- 

 selves than are presented by the organisms in 

 toto. To this extent the cell theory is justified 

 and significant. In the adults of the higher 

 animals, however, the consideration of striated 

 muscle fibers and of various supporting tissues 

 leads the author to state that the cell theory is 

 heve " simply inadequate," and he finds that 

 " the ground substance, the cell, the fiber 

 (ducts in plants), etc., must be accepted as 

 coordinate descriptive material in our histo- 

 logical inventory." But he regards granules 

 as having no more general characters than 

 their configuration, and every granule theory 

 is declared illusory. 



The third lecture is entitled the " substratum 

 of development," and approaches the problem 

 of the origin of new organisms. After noting 

 that the earliest beginning of the future organ- 

 ism which can be recognized and individual- 

 ized as such, has its own antecedent in the 

 maternal organism, not recognizable with the 

 methods of to-day but which may be with 

 those of to-morrow. Dr. Gurwitsch proceeds 

 to consider the ovum, and thus the nature of 

 protoplasm in general. In abbreviated form, 

 he writes: 



The investigation of protoplasmic structure is 

 among the pet problems of histology. If only sel- 

 dom expressed, most of such studies have been in- 

 spired by the wish and hope of finding something in 

 the structure of protoplasm which would explain its 

 ' ' properties. ' ' But this hope gradually paled as 

 the investigator became lost in the labyrinth of 

 microscopic pictures. There was a lack of sufficient 

 appreciation of the part which induction plays in 

 apparently so simple a procedure as describing 

 what is seen. Many times we imagine that we ac- 

 complish this in a purely objective way, when in 



