86 PROCEEDINGS: BOSTON SOCIETY NATURAL HISTORY. 
Earlier, general physiology had made some headway but the great 
wave of interest roused by the doctrine of descent swept the younger 
men of the time largely into the fields of morphology and embryology 
and these other subjects suffered. In his paper "On certain phe- 
nomena of growing old" (1890, 1891, p. 18) Minot touches this: — 
" There has been extremely little scientific work done on the peculiar- 
ities of the organism as a whole. It seems to me that in face of the 
living world we stand very much in the position of a scientific man who 
should study physics and chemistry in the laboratory and never have 
the slightest knowledge of geology or of the way in which the physical 
and chemical forces act in the world or throughout the universe." 
It was with such ideas in mind that he followed the problem of the 
growth of the animal body, using the guinea-pig for his principal 
researches. Through the various ages he followed the general growth 
processes and was particularly struck by the fact that the rate of 
growth so rapidly fell off and that in the ageing cell the relative mass of 
the cytoplasm is greatly increased. This last result he half humor- 
ously expressed in the statement that the relative increase of the 
cytoplasm was "the physical basis of advancing decrepitude." The 
rejuvenescence of the organism preparatory to this process of running 
down he associated with a relative increase of the nuclear substance. 
For these progressive changes in the cell he coined the term "cyto- 
morphosis." 
The question of the cessation of growth was of great interest to him 
and there was a host of minor problems growing out of these investiga- 
tions. In recent years the nuclear-cytoplasmic relation to which he 
drew attention has been much studied in several European labora- 
tories. Had these earlier investigations been continued, Minot's 
work might have had a different form. The research had been already 
carried through five years — with very complete records — when one 
night a dog, which had been insecurely tethered in the same room with 
the guinea-pigs, killed them all but four. To those who know what 
such work means and how the value and importance of the data in- 
crease with the progress of the research, the magnitude of this disaster 
will not need to be emphasized. It was a staggering blow and left 
Minot for the moment dazed. Although the problems in this field 
were always with him and the whole topic was presented in a most 
interesting manner in his Lowell Lectures as late as 1907, he never 
returned to the experimental work. 
