Abstract
PROF. BOVERI is so well known as a cytologist that anything from his pen will be read with interest. He is concerned in the little work before us in presenting in a non-technical fashion the main morphological peculiarities connected with fertilisation, and he also discusses the meaning of the processes involved. The appendix will probably be regarded by many as the most interesting part of the whole, as he there critically examines the results which have been obtained by Loeb on artificial parthenogenesis, and which have been confirmed and further investigated by Wilson. It will be within the recollection of some people that Loeb discovered the important fact that it is possible to induce normal development in unfertilised eggs of certain marine animals by treating them for some time with a 12 per cent, solution of magnesium chloride in seawater, and then retransferring the eggs to normal seawater. Morgan and others had previously found that the addition of salts of various kinds to the water sufficed to produce bodies remarkably like centrospheres, but it was not until Wilson showed this also to occur in Loeb's experiments, and that they almost certainly initiate the process of segmentation, that the significance of the earlier results became apparent.
Das Problem der Befruchtung.
Von Dr. Th. Boveri. Pp. 48. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1902.) Price Mk. 1.80.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
F., J. Das Problem der Befruchtung . Nature 66, 74 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/066074a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/066074a0