10 
The Queensland Naturalist February, 1934 
This is the fourth of an excellent nature study series 
issued by the Shakespeare Head Press, and the publish- 
ers deserve great credit for making available small, 
popular, and reliable books at a reasonable price. 
Mr. Stead can lay claim to be a general naturalist, 
but his speciality is the study of fishes and other marine 
life. 
This book is divided into fifteen chapters. The first 
four deal with life in the sea in a general way. The re- 
maining eleven chapters are each devoted to a group of 
fish or other sea denizens, e.g., whales, dolphins, sharks, 
swordfish, mackerels, eels, etc. 
A copy of the book should find its way into every 
school library, and teachers, particularly in coastal 
localities, could take excellent lessons from its pages. 
AN IMPORTANT PAPER : A REVIEW. 
‘'The Origin, Classification and Organic Relation- 
ships of the Protein Produced by Inorganic Ferruginous 
Material/’ By W. D. Francis, Brisbane, 1933. 15 pp. and 
1 plate. 
In June, 1932, Mr. W. D. Francis, who is Assistant 
Government Botanist, Brisbane, read a paper before the 
Royal Society of Queensland, outlining the experimental 
production of protein by inorganic material. This was 
published in the Proceedings of that Society in 1933. A 
continuation of the investigation has yielded significant 
results, so important that a fairly comprehensive review 
of the author’s further work is given herewith. The 
present paper summarises three phases of Mr. Francis’s 
work. The first deals with the location of the protein- 
producing reactions in the ferruginous material. In the 
second phase the relationship of the protein-producing 
experiments to the living activities of the iron bacteria is 
elucidated. The third phase is concerned chefly with the 
classification and organic relationships of the protein 
produced by the inorganic, ferruginous material. 
By microscopic studies of precipitated ferrous 
hydroxide and by means of micro-chemical tests it is 
shown that the protein bodies originate in microscopic 
masses of ferrous hydroxide. 
Ferrous hydroxide provides a most appropriate 
