NOTES AND COMMENT 



Dr. Henry Kraemer, of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, has 

 long been active in his efforts to have pharmacologists feel the logical 

 position of their subject as a branch of botany, and to have botanists 

 appreciate more fully the work of his co-professionals. His latest con- 

 tribution to these ends has been in the form of a series of articles in The 

 Pharmaceutical Era on The Rise and Development of Pharmacognosy'', 

 in which the close inter-relationship of this subject and its mother 

 science is clearly and interestingly brought forth. 



Readers who expect to find a contribution in Leduc's Mechanism of 

 Life, translated by Butcher, will be grievously disappointed. The 

 author is a professor in the School of Medicine at Nantes, and the 

 translator is an ex-president of the Rontgen Society. Although the 

 French Academy of Science excluded this paper from its Comptes 

 Rendus as late as 1907, for reasons apparent to any plant physiologist 

 who reads the first ten pages, yet the names of its author and sponsor 

 have persuaded a reputable pubhshing house to foist this book on a 

 confiding scientific public. The translator unctuously attributes the 

 disfavor showTi the paper in the country of its author to the fact that 

 it "touched too closely on the burning question of spontaneous gen- 

 eration." 



The would-be Columbus in physiology deals in outworn generaliza- 

 tions and superficial resemblances of osmotic phenomena to morpho- 

 genetic phenomena in living matter. Only in so far as the book happens 

 to state well established conclusions is it useful as part of a scientific 

 library, and the reader is recommended to seek his references under 

 less questionable setting. The artificial parthenogenesis induced by 

 Loeb and Delage is said to be caused by " plunging the egg into a liquid 

 other than sea water, and returning it to its original medium," the 

 results being attributed solely to diffusion and cohesion, although we 

 believe no reputable biologist holds to such a view understandingly. 



The grotesque superficiality of this unique little book is well indicated 

 by the sentence, taken from p. 159, which reads: "We caimot at pres- 

 ent produce osmotic growth with all the combinations found in living 



127 



