Percentage AlivenessSource: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Mar., 1923), pp. 333-335Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/6486 .

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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 333

point of our present knowledge. To bring that about we must bridge the rivers of ignorainee alnd new highways through the juingles of superstition.

PERCENTAGE ALIVENESS WHEN I dropped into Professor

Wiinthrop J. V. Osterhout 's labora- tory at Wood's Hole by, the sea I f ouind him at first quite too busy to talk to me. Every minute or two his assistant would hancd him a porcelain dish containing a few drops of cell sap which he would hastily analyze by couniting the number of drops from a pipette that would change its color. It was a, familiar chemical test ancd in fact I would have thought myself in the laboratory of a chemist insteadl of a botanist if it had not been for some basins of dcank seaweed lying arounld. There was a lot of electrical appara- tus, too, galvanometers, resistance boxes and the like, suclh as nio bot- anist ever bothered wvitlh in the days wlihea I was youlng.

In those day-s the boulndaries be- tween the sciences were well defined andl a professor klnew what he was professor of. Eveen if he taught two or more sciences he was careful not to mix them. A botanist did niot lhave any use for a chemist unless he waanted to borrow paraffin or alcohol from him. Now the botanists and zoologists seem to be going over in a body to chemistry and physics. And it is a question how much will be left of the biological sciences when the physical sciences get what they want out of them.

The differences between the old botany and the new became still more apparent to me -when Professor Osterhout explained to me what he w,as doing and what he was aiming at.

He was endleavoring to apply quan- titative measureenelt to the processes of life, to findc mathemlatical formulas that wvould showv just how miucluh a plint or aniimal cell is alive or how near it is to the zero point, wlhich we c,ll( death. Mathemiiatics is another thing, that the old-fashioned botanist

hadc no use for. It is as easy to count the petals oni a flower as to count one 's fingers. But Professor Oster- hout 's new book, " Injury, Recov- ery aind Death, is chock-full of mathematical symbols of the toughest sort.

He fincds one of the best ways to measure vitality is to determine how wvell a cell conducts electricitv. For the protoplasm that fills all cells offers considerable resistanee to the passage of a current so lonig as it is alive, but as soon as it is dead its resistanice falls off. If it is partly dead its resistance is measurably re- (luced.

Giv-e Professor Osterhout various saiiples of seaweed of which some are thrivinig ancd others have beein in- jured in varving degrees by putting theml inlto water that is too fresh or too salt, or by exposure to hot sun- shinie or by poisoninig with nicotine. They all look equally green and healthy, but by testing the condue- tivitv he caln tell you which have been injured the most and how much.

What is more, he can tell which have been injured beyond recovery and which will be restored to a state of normialcy oln being put back into ordinary seawater. If, for instalnce, a strip of eel grass has been injured to the extent of five per cent. by over-salting, it will recover fully when it gets back into its native ele- ment. But if it has been injured 25 per cent. its electrical resistance rises to oinlv 90 per cent. of the normal. If the iinjury amounts to 90 per cent. there is no recovery.

He findls whatever alters the elec- trical conductivity of plant or ani- mal tissue, whether it be a crushing blow, too much heat, lack of air, lack of water, presence of poisons or any- thing else, will shorten or impair the life of the organism. He comes to the conclusion that life is a series of balanced chemical processes alnd that wheni this balance is disturbed by, a chaange in the elnvironiment olne process goes faster than another andl

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W-id e World Photos FATHER ANTD SON

M. Ratoucheff, the Russian impresario, wvith his SOnl Andelr, wrho is tw^enty years of age. The son, wsho is twenty-six inches in height, is the leader of the Russianl Midgets nlOW pla.ying inl. London. MI. Ratoucheff is six feet four inches.

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THIE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 335

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Wide World Photos T'WINS IN ONE FAMfILY

Four sets of twins in a family at Martinl's Ferry, Ohio. There' are in the family two other children who are not twins.

then the creature grows or decays, thrives or declines. Dying is there- fore a normal part of living. The only danger is in its getting to going too fast.

Professor Osterhout does not say anything about the application of his discoveries and theories to human life. So far as I know he has not carried his experiments farther up the scale of life than frog 's skin. So it will be some time before we can know whether there is any sense in our crude quantitative expressions of vitality, "I feel half dead" or ' more dead than alive, ' by whieh we mean usually that we are "dead tired. "

THE ANCESTRAL SCANDA9LS OF SCIENCE

TRACING back the history of a sci- ence is like searching out a geneal- ogy; one is sure to unearth some- thing scandalous if he goes back far enoughl. John G. Saxe warned the would-be ancestor worshipper of this dlanger in the familiar lines:

Depend upon it, my snobbish friend, Your family thread you can't ascend, WVitlhout good reason to apprehend You may find it waxed at the farther end

By some plebeian vocation! Or, worse than that, your boasted line M lay end in a ioop of a stronger twine,

That plagued some worthy relation.

The chemist handles with reverent awe the latest unearthed and earliest written text of his science, a scrap of Egyptian papyrus, but wheni he gets it translated he finds it is a counterfeiter's recipe, a method of, making base metals look like gold. Or else it is a recipe for cosmetics I which is also a form of counterfeit- ing.

The astronomer finds in a Baby- lonian brick the first record of the stars but discovers to his disgust that the cuneiform inscription is an astro- logical treatise, a fortune-teller handbook.

Hero of Alexandria described the turbine steam-engine, the coin-in-a- slot machine and other valuable in- ventions. But what were they in- vented for ? So the priests of the

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