[Short Notices]

Abstract

THIS is a dramatic book and should be read as such, for though it does not deal with the journeyings of men and women, of their love affairs and battles, yet it has relation to a subject old as man himself, that of fire. As long as there has been human thought, it must have struggled to understand fire; many civilisations got no further than worshipping it, until at long last there came a man, Lavoisier, who raised the curtain of ignorance and disclosed the re of oxygen in the kindling. In fact, it was not until systematic experiment took the place of dogma—and this did not happen until the seventeenth century—that the real facts of combustion could be elucidated and the phlogiston theory laid to rest. To-day we still concern ourselves with the mechanism of combustion and the order of events, but the points of issue are but minnows compared with the tritons of old.

Combustion from Heracleitos to Lavoisier.

By Joshua C. Gregory. Pp. vii + 231. (London: Edward Arnold and Co., 1934.) 10s. 6d. net.