Exposés Annuels de Biochemie Médicale

233 told the story without years of observation and without more than a dash of the trial-and-error technique,-of testing and verifying, of discarding and then reassembling. Had this present volume been at hand it would have been at once clear that such processes were at the very basis of the theory. Darwin did have his doubts, his perplexities, his misinterpretations, and out of these came The Origin. The 36 letters written to his family on the five-year voyage of the Beagle make Darwin very much a human being, and also very much a scientist. The excerpts from his Notebooks reveal clearly that his close observation and his questioning mind made of everything encountered material that was grist for his mill. M\ost of the material published here has never before appeared in print, and it adds tothe legend that was Darwin. Reviews of Biochemistry, although the subjects reviewed are frequently more limited in scope, thus permitting a more detailed discussion of the literature for several years. The first review, by R. Courrier, is a brief survey (7 pages) of certain properties of steroid hormones. The following article, by Gabriel Florence, contains a comprehensive discussion (57 pages) of the application of spectroscopy to biology. Over 200 references are cited by full title. The article by Jacques Roskam discusses in. 19 pages factors which influence bleeding time. Jean Roche has contributed a discussion (24 pages) of the role of various metals in regulating enzyme function. The role of sodium and potassium in the body is reviewed at length by P. Boulanger (41 pages, 500 references). The editor, with R. G. Busnel, has contributed a timely review on the biochemistry of the pterins (48 pages, 86 references). The review by C. Sannie is concerned with the pigments and antibiotics of bacteria and molds. Although the article is brief for such an extensive field (42 pages), a valuable bibliography of some 750 references with full titles presents the literature to December, 1944. The final review, by C. Fromageot, is concerned with some aspects of sulfur metabolism in higher animals (18 pages, 100 references). This book is well printed, with clear charts and two excellent color plates. The editor has permitted the utmost variations in format, particularly in the bibliographies. A feature which will appeal only to the most confirmed biblio-phile, however, is the large number of uncut pages.-H. P. TREFFERS.