Miscellaneous Intelligence. 79 



III. Miscellaneous Scientific Intelligence. 



1. Equilibrium and Vertigo; by Isaac H. Jones, M.A., M.D. 

 Pp. 15, 444. Philadelphia, 1918 (J. B. Lippincott Company, 

 $5.00). — This book, bearing the stamp of approval of the Office 

 of the Surgeon General of the Army of the United States, may 

 be characterized by one quotation from the text ; " It is only in 

 the past few years that the function of the vestibular portion of 

 the labyrinth has been carefully studied, preeminently by the 

 Vienna group of otologists, to whom we are indebted for new 

 methods of testing the internal ear." The book may in fact be 

 regarded as the embodiment of the Vienna doctrine by the chief 

 American apologist of the cult. To the quotation from Jones, 

 one may be permitted to add a quotation from the preface to 

 Huxley 's ' ' Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals " : "I have inten- 

 tionally refrained from burdening the text with references ; and, 

 therefore, the reader, while he is justly entitled to hold me 

 responsible for any errors he may detect, will do well to give me 

 no credit for what may seem original, unless his knowledge is 

 such as to render him a competent judge on that head." Hux- 

 ley's statement might be amplified somewhat to the effect that 

 one should be extremely cautious in accepting the statements in 

 the book as true unless his knowledge is sufficient to render him 

 a competent judge on that head. This caution is the more nec- 

 essary because of the numerous loose and even confusing or 

 inaccurate statements to be found throughout the work. Taking 

 our quotation above as one example, it may be pointed out that 

 Erasmus Darwin and Purkinje, to go no further back, were well 

 acquainted with rotation vertigo, and that the classical statement 

 of its laws is that of Purkinje in 1820. Hitzig worked out the 

 laws of galvanic vertigo in 1871 and brought them into line 

 with the laws of rotation vertigo. Goltz and von Troeltsch were 

 both familiar with the effects of incautious irrigation of the 

 external auditory meatus with hot or cold water in 1870. The 

 classical statement of the function of the vestibular, as distin- 

 guished from the cochlear or auditory, portion of the ear, is due 

 to Alexander Crum Brown, Joseph Breuer and Ernst Mach in 

 the early seventies. Brown's statement in 1876 of the function 

 of the semicircular canal apparatus — the preception of the 

 change of aspect of the head in space — is as good as any that 

 has been made. The study of the relation of the central nervous 

 system to the reactions to stimulation of or lesions of the vesti- 

 bular portion of the ear has been of more recent date, but a sur- 

 prisingly small amount of fundamental knowledge, compared 

 with what is known, is due to the otologists of the modern Vienna 

 school. 



A misstatement of a more serious character is found on page 

 14. The physiologist and the neuroanatomist recognize that the 



