280 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [MARCH 
production and interchange of substances among human beings, which we know 
as barter and exchange or commerce, can never of itself integrate those con- 
cerned into an orderly and harmonious whole, a tribe or nation. Government 
of some sort, that is, authority and its transmission, is the real integrating factor, 
and commercial relations do not assume an orderly harmonious character until 
at least some degree of integration has taken place. 
Loes is attempting to conceive the organism as a whole in terms of the 
commercial relations between its parts. This is as if one should attempt to 
interpret a nation or state and its origin in terms of the production and exchange 
of commodities between its constituent members or groups. The one attempt 
is as futile as the other. Actually Lors has failed to see the organism as a 
lating to show that control, that is, eitament in the organism, is a physio- 
logical fact, and the primary fact in the integration of the individual, that such 
control originates in quantitative differences in the velocity of metabolic 
reactions and the associated protoplasmic differences together with the trans- 
mission of energy changes resulting from these differences rather than in the 
transportation of substances, and that the nervous system is morphologically 
and physiologically merely the expression of the transmissive relations which 
exist from the beginning of individuation. This conception is not only sup- 
ported by many lines of evidence, but it comes much nearer LOEB’ S deat 
of scientific biology as the reduction of life f to than 
does his own interpretation in terms of formative or “nutritive substances. 
Certainly the egg is the embryo in the rough, as Lors maintains, and so is any 
other reproductive cell or cell mass, but since the embryo and the organism 
developing from it are orderly and harmonious wholes, the egg and other 
reproductive bodies must also be wholes of the same sort. It is here that we 
come face to face with-the problem of the organism as a whole, and LOEB 
offers us nothing but the bare assertion, oft repeated, that the egg is the embryo 
in the rough, and this is merely the statement of the problem, not the solution. 
He has contented himself with this mere statement of the real problem and has 
passed on to devote himself to the innumerable details of the activity of the 
organism in which the wholeness is already established and effective. If this 
were all that mechanistic biology has to offer toward the solution of the prob- 
lem of the organism, the vitalist might rest content. 
we search in vain for the organism as a whole in the book, however, 
there is nevertheless much of interest. It must be admitted that those familiar 
with Loes’s earlier books will find little that is new, particularly in certain 
chapters, and that often there is no consideration of the work of others, but, 
as a statement of Lors’s conception of the organism, the book cannot fail to 
interest the biologist, even though, or perhaps because, me will find himself 
unable to assent to many of its conclusions.—C. M. Cur 
