La Forme et le Mouvement: essai de dynamique de la vie

Abstract

THE title leads one to expect a discussion of the effect of movement on the form of animals, perhaps new evidence for Lamarck. Nothing could be further from the author's intention. He seeks to show that the laws regulating the reproduction and growth of living creatures are the same as those which govern their movements, and that these are the laws of chemical physics. The conception of an organism as a whirlpool is at least as old as Cuvier, but remained little more than a useful analogy till F. Houssay superimposed on it the idea of vibration. But for him both the vortex and its vibrations expressed the effect on the creature of its environment. Prof. Bohn starts with molecules of living substance, the inherent vibrations of which produce a system not merely vortical but polarised, manifesting its internal forces through oscillations in space and in time. That sentence, so far as possible in Prof. Bohn's own words, will scarcely be intelligible to one who has not read the book. Nor, we are warned, will perusal of the book profit an inquirer unacquainted with the fundamental ideas of physics and mechanics. It may therefore be due to some gap in our knowledge that we rise from a second reading provoked but puzzled, interested but unconvinced.

La Forme et le Mouvement: essai de dynamique de la vie.

By Georges Bohn. (Bibliothèque de Culture générale. ) Pp. xii+175. (Paris: Ernst Flammarion, 1921.) 4 fr. 50 net.