50 YEARS AGO

An Outline of the Cancer Problem. — It is almost as difficult to review a popular book on cancer as to write one, and for similar reasons. The subject ranges over such a vast canvas that one is always acutely aware of numerous important omissions and of the minor distortions which inevitably appear... One is compelled to stress those aspects most dominant in one's own experience, and Dr. I. Hieger naturally stresses the important role of the chemical carcinogens in etiology. He was in the team which first isolated from coal tar a pure chemical carcinogen, and he gives us the most interesting story of this pioneer discovery. Moreover, we have seen lately the firm linkage of exposure to tobacco and industrial smoke to the tremendously rising incidence of lung cancer... If it is shown that lung cancer is in fact due to exposure to chemical carcinogens in smoke, their practical significance in human cancer will become of greatly enhanced importance.

From Nature 19 November 1955.

100 YEARS AGO

American palaeontologists are becoming more and more strongly convinced of the decisive character of the evidence afforded by extinct faunas of a comparatively recent connection between South America, South Africa, and Australia. A short time ago, Dr. W. B. Scott...announced his opinion that the fossil Santa Cruz insectivore Necrolestes is closely allied to the South African Chrysochloris, and that this relationship indicated a connection between South Africa and South America. Now Mr. W. J. Sinclair... states unequivocally that Prothylacinus and the other marsupial-like carnivores of the Santa Cruz beds are true marsupials closely related to the Australian thylacine... Mr. Sinclair considers himself justified in stating that...”a land connection between Patagonia and the Australian region existed not later than the close of the Cretaceous or the beginning of the Tertiary”.

From Nature 16 November 1905.