Human Physiology

Abstract

CONCERNING the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, Clemenceau is alleged to have remarked that the French people also had memorials to the illustrious dead. During the past few years there have appeared several revised editions of the standard works on human physiology used by medical students fifteen or twenty years ago. The changes necessitated by the rapid strides which physiology has made during the intervening period are extensive; and the advisability of putting so much new wine into old, if illustriously old, bottles is questionable. In chapter after chapter a short postscript on the discovery of an oxygen is added to a lengthy exposition of a phlogiston hypothesis. In the mind of the student who approaches his studies in this way confusion is inevitable. In the labyrinth of Nature the path of scientific discovery is often tortuous. One expedition after another ends in a cul-de-sac, from which the inquirer must needs retrace his footsteps and make a fresh start. To the philosopher and student of scientific method such reverses are meat and drink. They only bewilder the beginner.

Human Physiology.

Dr. F. R. Winton Dr. L. E. Bayliss. With a Chapter on The Physiology of the Sense Organs, by Dr. R. J. Lythgoe. Pp. xiv + 583. (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1930.) 15s.