December 4, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



841 



to a senior worker is severely tried. The book 

 claims to be the first attempt to unite the well- 

 established facts of astro- geo- and experimental- 

 physics, and to refer the form of continents and 

 sea basins, mountain chains, volcanoes and 

 earthquakes, fossils, glacial periods, etc., to a 

 single fundamental law of nature. The argu- 

 ment is briefly as follows : The cooling of the 

 earth is discarded as a cause of surface crump- 

 ling, not because the process is insufficient, but 

 because such cooling would — it is alleged — 

 cause only tensile and not compressive forces in 

 the crust (a complete misapprehension of the 

 hypothesis). Insomuch as temporary stars 

 have been explained as explosions of occluded 

 gases, it is concluded that overwhelming catas- 

 trophes might thus be caused on the earth. The 

 huge craters produced by such eruptions are 

 most gratuitously assumed to be the means of 

 determining the leading lines of terrestrial re- 

 lief ; the collapsing of the craters causes the 

 lands to slide and wrinkle ; and inasmuch as the 

 successive catastrophes must have extinguished 

 all forms of life, evolution is brushed aside and 

 the Mosaic account of creation is re-established. 

 The author's graphic skill is employed to illus- 

 trate the post-Tertiary changes of the continents 

 in a series of six beautiful diagrams, whose 

 absurdity would be amusing were their imagi- 

 native innocence not plaintive. 



Much more might be said ; but less would 

 hardly constitute fair mention of a book that 

 claims to be the ' outline of an exact cosmogony. ' 



W. M. D. 



SOME RECENT RESEARCHES ON THE CHEMISTRY 

 OF THE CELL.* 



Miescher's untimely death, after many years 

 of patient work, left his epoch-making re- 

 searches upon the chemical composition of the 

 sperm of the salmon still unfinished. The re- 

 sults contained in the paper here reviewed 

 represent but a small part of all that he ac- 



*1. F. Miescher. Physiologico-chemical Researches 

 on the Sperm of the Salmon (contributed by O. 

 Schmiedeberg): Archiv fvir Experimentelle Patho- 

 logie and Pharmakologie, XXXVII., 1896. 



2. A. Kossel. On the Basic Stuffs of the Cell- 

 nucleus : Zeitscbnft fiir Physiologische Chemie, 

 XXII., 1896. 



complished, but this much only was it pos- 

 sible for Dr. O. Schmiedeberg to collect and 

 put together from Miescher's scattered notes. 

 Regarding the structure of the spermatozoon 

 Miescher has little to add to his account of 1874. 

 The head of the sperm consists of a hull and an 

 inner substance. The hull was of alkaline re- 

 action since it stained in decolorized cyanin, 

 but not in methyl green. The inner substance 

 stained deeply in methyl green. The head also 

 contained a so-called 'Centralstabchen,' ap- 

 parently a prolongation of the tail forward into 

 the head. No middle-piece could be distin- 

 guished. 



1. Histo- chemical Isolation. — If the ripe, quite 

 fresh sperm be centrifugalized, the sperm-fluid 

 in which the spermatozoa float may be separ- 

 ated from them. This fluid was found to con- 

 tain 0.19^ organic constituents (a mere trace of 

 albumen), and 0.75 fo inorganic salts, chiefly 

 NaCl, NajCOg, KCl and KoSO^. It is evidently 

 a harmless fluid, analogous to physiological salt 

 solution, in which the spermatozoa are sus- 

 pended and which serves only to give the 

 sperm-mass the necessary fluidity for ejection. 



If, after removal of this fluid by Glauber's 

 salts solution (in which the spermatozoa remain 

 intact) the clean sperm be extracted with suc- 

 cessive portions of water and many times cen- 

 trifugalized, the tails swell and pass over into the 

 fluid, leaving behind a sediment of sperm-heads. 

 In this way it is possible to obtain separately 

 heads and tails in sufficient quantities for separ- 

 ate analysis. Under the microscope the heads are 

 seen to retain intact their characteristic form. 

 Collected under alcohol they look like an inor- 

 ganic, heavy, snow white powder like barium 

 sulphate or calcium oxalate. 



2. Constitution of the Tails. — Analysis of the 

 substances obtained from the tails isolated in 

 this manner show that they consist of 41.9^ 

 albumen not farther investigated; S1.8S fo 

 lecithin, a body generally present in all cells 

 but especially abundant in nerve-tissue ; and 

 26.27% of fats and cholesterin. The fats con- 

 sist of fatty acids, which occur as soaps. The 

 tails contain no nucleic acid or protamin. In a 

 letter to W. His the author writes : ' ' The 

 farther I go with the tails, the more probable it 

 seems to me that we have before us essentially 



