NOTES AND LITERATURE 
GENERAL BIOLOGY 
Iron and Living Matter.' — The title together with the first para- 
graph of the preface gives a fairly correct idea of the contents of this 
book. A somewhat free translation of the paragraph referred to is 
as follows: In the course of my bacteriological and morphological 
Studies I, like so many other observers, felt myself simply over- 
powered with the infinite variety of the vital phenomena and felt an 
almost irresistible necessity to gather all these phenomena together 
under some one fundamental principle. In the course of my 
attempts to find such a principle I came finally to the conclusion 
that all vital phenomena are due in the last instance to the oxidation 
of the iron of living matter. 
One scarcely feels like taking the author’s discussions of the vital 
phenomena and their causes seriously because they seem so much 
more like the dreamy wanderings of an imaginative but untrained 
mind than like a scientific presentation of a coherent set of facts. 
It is not clear just why or how the author came to decide upon the 
oxidation of iron as being the one fundamental process back of the 
life phenomena. He states in the preface that what helped more 
than anything else to fix this view in his mind was the fact that he 
had succeeded in explaining by means of it all the enzyme reactions. 
Indeed the only experimental work recorded in the book is that 
which is intended to prove that the characteristic enzyme reactions 
are nothing more or less than the effects of oxidations and reductions 
of the iron which they are supposed to contain. 
The experimental work which is supposed to prove this surprising 
result consists simply of qualitative tests for iron and phosphoric 
acid in Merck’s commercial enzyme preparations ! The author does 
not seem to understand that the occurrence of traces of iron and 
Phosphorus in commercial enzyme preparations may be only impuri- 
ties and not a part of the active enzyme, nor does he seem to know 
! Sacharoff, U. Das Eisen als das thatige es der Enzyme und der leben- 
digen Substanz. Translated into German by Dr. M. Rechtsamer in Odessa. 
ena, Fischer, 1902. 8vo, 83 pp., 2 pls. 
665 
