Abstract
THIS neat little book has the attractive form and style which characterises many French science manuals, and shares with them the defects inherent in any attempt to convey the difficult results of refined biological research in short paragraphs, even when written in the clearest of languages. At the same time we must add that it does not profess to be a complete text-book or treatise on the subject, and it is perhaps best described as a series of notes on some modern results of the study of the cell, by a zoologist. Artificial protoplasm and artificial karyokinetic figures are misleading terms to the beginner, and the scraps of information here gathered can be of little or no use to more advanced readers. The action of physical and chemical agents on the structure, metabolism, and movements of the cell seems curiously incomplete, in a French work, without reference to the yeast-plant; and although the notes on chemotaxis are interesting, they might have been rendered more valuable had the botanical side of the question been more fully dealt with. Indeed, throughout the work we notice a lack of appreciation of the work of plant-physiologists, e.g. as regards geotropic and heliotropic curvatures—no doubt inevitable where the author is a zoologist, the domain of each subject being now so wide that no one writer can deal adequately with both. Klebs'' work on the effects of the environment in modifying the reproduction of algæ, for instance, is not mentioned.
La Cytologie Expérimentale.
By A. Labbé. Pp. viii + 187. (Paris: Carré, 1898.)
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La Cytologie Expérimentale. Nature 59, 366 (1899). https://doi.org/10.1038/059366a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/059366a0