L'Hérédité

Abstract

THE scientific experimental study of heredity may be said to have begun with the present century. The views of the early hybridisers were too vague, and were based upon results too varied and indefinite to lead anywhere. Moreover, the work of the nineteenth century was required to build up an edifice of knowledge concerning organic structure and development, the nature of sexual reproduction, and the structural basis of heredity, before definite views of the laws of inheritance could be propounded and accepted. But in the last twenty-four years advance has been rapid, because all these and other lines have converged upon the solution of the central problem of heredity. Where all was formerly hazy and nebulous, results are now seen to be clean-cut and precise, continually opening up further vistas of understanding concerning the relations between the details of organic structure as we find them, and the laws and exceptions to the laws of inheritance as they are developed by experimental work.

L'Hérédité.

Par Prof. Émile Guyénot. (Encyclopédie scientifique: Bibliothèque de Biologie générale.) Pp. 463. (Paris: Gaston Doin, 1924.) 19·80 frs.