Biological Lectures from the Marine Biological Laboratory, Wood's Holl, Massachusetts, 1898

Abstract

THIS volume, like its predecessors, is the joint production of several of the leading biologists of the United States, indicative to a certain extent of the trend of thought and investigation in their midst, and, like its predecessors, it teams with interest and sug-gestiveness. Of the sixteen lectures reported, the majority are by well-known authors, and the book is remarkable for the extent to which it deals with questions of a cytological and psychological nature, in contradistinction to those of a more strictly morphological, such as we are accustomed to associate with a marine laboratory. Not that the latter have been neglected for a remarkable essay by A. D. Mead, on the “Cell Origin of the Prototroch,” which would seem to justify once more the belief in the ancestral nature of the Trochophore larva, is a thorough-going piece of sea-side work. The subject of “Cell-Lineage and Ancestral Reminiscence,” in the hands of Prof. E. B. Wilson, yields fresh support for the theory that homologies only gradually arise during development, and that “the ultimate court of appeal lies in the fate of the cells”; and in a preliminary account of some investigations into the “Structure of Protoplasm” the same author is led to conclude, with von Kölliker, basing his observations of the Echinoderm egg that “no universal or even general formula for protoplasmic structure can be given, and that the foam-structure of Bütschli is in certain cases at least of secondary origin.”

Biological Lectures from the Marine Biological Laboratory, Wood's Holl, Massachusetts, 1898.

Pp. 343. (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1899.)

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