On the physical basis of life

PROF. E. B. WILSON, in this, the first William Thompson Sedgwick Memorial Lecture, has given biologists an extremely interesting glimpse of the line which his thoughts, stimulated by the recent advances in cytology, genetics, and developmental physiology, are pursuing. Prof. Wilson is not only the doyen of cytologists and an all-round zoologist of the first rank, but also one of the select few among scientific workers capable of writing clearly and with style. His cytological reflections on chromosomes as the physical basis of heredity, and on the Golgi bodies and mitochondria, illuminate the subject, while his all-too-brief discussion of certain facts of experimental embryology runs along a somewhat unfamiliar track.The Physical Basis of Life.By Edmund B. Wilson. Pp. iv + 51. (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1923.) 7s. net.