[Book Reviews]

Abstract

THIS is an example of a ‘semi-popular' book on science of a kind which seems to be characteristic of the United States. The field covered is adumbrated in the first two sentences of the preface : "The mystery of life so long unsolved, and by many regarded as beyond human understanding, has been slowly revealing itself in the light of scientific investigation. The purpose of this book is to present in coherent order sufficient facts regarding material biological phenomena to show that life is dominated by catalysis—the direction of chemical change by surface areas of specific structure and efficiency." In pursuit of this aim the author wanders—alas, not very coherently—over a vast area which includes almost every topic from nuclear physics to modern psychology. He quotes rather extensively from detailed original papers, and certainly parades before his readers a huge and heterogeneous assemblage of facts and suppositions. But throughout most of the book, the theoretical structure which connects, say, a paragraph on the determination of the different castes in Hymenoptera with one on the recognition by rattlesnakes of their reptilian enemies amounts to no more than a repetition of the sentiment that here -we have catalysis at work again. The book should have been pruned to half its size ; its argument, which is by no means novel but probably worth stating clearly for a popular audience, would then have emerged much more forcibly.

Life : its Nature and Origin

By Jerome Alexander. Pp. ix+291. (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1948.), 30s net.