Abstract
TWENTY years have passed since the appearance of Wilson's "Cell", that is of the third and all-embracing 1,200-page edition of this work. We may indeed take 1925 as the end of an epoch, the epoch of comprehensive description; always painstaking, usually thorough, and sometimes otiose, description. In the end this method collapsed of its own weight and broke into pieces. Since 1925 we have been busy putting the pieces together. There are many ways of doing this, most of them unprofitable, but some of them have given new structures of a kind not previously known in biology. Such, for example, is the genography based on the union of breeding analysis, X-ray breakage and salivary gland mapping. On the purely cytological side there is also the speculative structure based on a few simple observations of meiosis in polyploid plants, a structure on which we have been able to rest all our knowledge of genetic crossing-over as well as a large part of our knowledge of chromosome mechanics at meiosis and mitosis. Other special theoretical structures are arising, or will arise, from the new experimental methods of ultra-centrifuging, X-ray breakage, ultraviolet absorption spectroscopy, micro-incineration, specific enzyme treatments, and so on.
Mitosis
The Movements of Chromosomes in Cell Division. By Prof. Franz Schrader. Pp. x + 110. (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1944.). 13s. 6d. net.
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DARLINGTON, C. Mitosis. Nature 155, 466 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155466a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155466a0