392 Scientific Intelligence. 



add merely to the complexity of the response ; the purely physi- 

 cal, automatic character of the latter remains unchanged. ' ' 

 Dercum holds that the cortical neurones have the property of 

 amoeboidism. "In sleep the neurones have their processes 

 retracted ; in consciousness their processes are extended. ' ' 

 Quiescent neurones occupy the unconscious field, Dr. Dercum 's 

 discussion is compact and readable. It assembles many facts in 

 an original manner. As a broad formulation of the mechanical 

 basis of behavior it has a suggestive value. 



In an addendum on the Pathological Physiology of Mind, the 

 author applies his formulae to the interpretation of dementia 

 praecox, delirium, hysteria, etc. It is here that the explanatory 

 weakness of the formuke is clearly revealed; and the result 

 approaches what Adolph Meyer once called "neurologizing tau- 

 tology. " " Dementia praecox is essentially an affection of endo- 

 genous deterioration." It results in "adynamia of the field of 

 cortical activity." "The level, the intensity of the metabolic 

 processes, of the neurones is lowered," with resulting slowness 

 of speech, poverty of thought, etc. Mental phenomena may in 

 essence be physical, as the author holds, but their further eluci- 

 dation depends upon dynamic, genetic studies of personality, by 

 psychiatric and psychological methods. Poverty of thought, for 

 example, may be more apparent than real, and instead of repre- 

 senting a quantitative reduction in the physico-chemical sense, it 

 may have an altogether different significance when given a func- 

 tional interpretation. Arnold gesell, m.d. 



10. Royal Natural History Museum at Brussels. — The fourth 

 part of volume VIII (Memoir 31) is an extended quarto volume 

 of 208 pages with 233 textfigures, devoted to the Chironomides of 

 Belgium and especially those of the Flanders. The author is 

 Dr. M. Goetghebuer, who was also the author of part three on 

 the Ceratopogonince of Belgium (1920). 



OBITUARY. 



M. Camille Jordan, the veteran French mathematician and a 

 man of rare genius, died in March at the age of eighty-four 

 years. 



Professor Benjamin Moore, who held (from 1918) the chair 

 of biochemistry in the University of Oxford and earlier a mem- 

 ber of the staff of the Yale Medical School, died on March 3 at the 

 age of fifty-five years. 



Dr. Augustus Desire Waller, director of the physiological 

 laboratory and professor of physiology in the University of 

 London, died on March 11 in his sixty-sixth year. 



Dr. Theodore Liebisch, professor of mineralogy at the Univer- 

 sity of Berlin, died on February 9 in his seventieth year. 



