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Needham J. Chemical Embryology Vol. 1. (1900)

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This historic 1900 volume 1 of a textbook by Needham describes chemical embryology. Internet Archive Also by this author: Needham J. Chemical Embryology Vol. 2. (1900) Modern Notes: Historic Textbooks

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Pages where the terms "Historic" (textbooks, papers, people, recommendations) appear on this site, and sections within pages where this disclaimer appears, indicate that the content and scientific understanding are specific to the time of publication. This means that while some scientific descriptions are still accurate, the terminology and interpretation of the developmental mechanisms reflect the understanding at the time of original publication and those of the preceding periods, these terms, interpretations and recommendations may not reflect our current scientific understanding. (More? Embryology History \| Historic Embryology Papers)

Chemical Embryology - Volume One

By

Joseph Needham

M.A., Ph.D.

Fellow of Gonville & Cains College, Cambridge, and University Demonstrator in Biochemistry.

New York: The Macmillan Company Cambridge, England: At The University Press 1931 Printed In Great Britain

Acknowledgements of Indebtedness

Those who have assisted me in the preparation of this work are so numerous that it is impossible to mention them all by name. Its original impetus was derived from a discussion with Professor Sir F. G. Hopkins in 1923 on the observation of Klein that inositol, though absent from the undeveloped hen's egg, was present in considerable quantity at hatching; and throughout the period of preparation his encouragement, help, and advice were never-failing. I have derived great benefit from the discussion of various points with Miss Marjory Stephenson, M. Louis Rapkine, Dr R. A. Fisher, and my wife. Professor J. T. Wilson has been repeatedly helpful to me on anatomical points, and in the Zoological Laboratory I was always sure of obtaining expert advice from Mr James Gray, Mr J. T. Saunders, Mr C. F. A. Pantin and Dr Eastham. I have relied much upon the kindness and wide biological knowledge of Dr D. Keilin and Dr F. H. A. Marshall. As regards the historical chapters, I am most grateful to Dr Charles Singer, who annotated them with valuable comments, and to Professor R. C. Punnett who placed unreservedly at my disposal his knowledge of the history of generation, and his library of old and rare biological books. To Dr Arthur Peck I am indebted for the correction of my Greek, and it was Professor A. B. Cook who guided me to the embryology of the ancients. Without the assiduous backing of Mr Powell, the Librarian of the Royal Society of Medicine, and his assistants, I should have dealt much more inadequately than I have with the papers which cannot be consulted in Cambridge. I have also to thank the administrators of the Thruston Fund of Gonville and Caius College for a grant which was devoted to incidental expenses. For the indexes I wish to thank Miss Helen Moyle, and for other services which have made the book possible, Mrs V. Townsend. My thanks are also due to the Editors of the following journals: Biochemical Journal, Journal of Experimental Biology, Biological Reviews, Science Progress, and the Monist, for permission to reprint passages from papers. I must record my gratitude to the following friends, who very kindly read through and criticised the proofs of the various sections:

Part I

Professor A. E. Boycott Dr J. H. Woodger

Part II

Professor R. C. Punnett Dr Charles Singer Dr Reuben Levy Dr Arthur Peck Sir William Dampier Professor A. B. Cook The Rev. W. Elmslie Professor F. M. Cornford

Part III

Section

1 Professor R. H. A. Plimmer Mr J. B. S. Haldane

2 Dr Samuel Brody Mr James Gray Dr E. N. Willmer

3 Mr G. R. de Beer

Mr C. H. Waddington Mr J. B. S. Haldane

4 Dr D. Keilin Professor Munro Fox

5 Mr T. R. Parsons Dr Malcolm Dixon

6 M. Louis Rapkine Mr C. Forster Cooper

7 Miss Marjory Stephenson M. Louis Rapkine

Dr D. Keilin

8 Dr Eric Holmes

Dr Bruce Anderson & Mrs Margaret Whetham Anderson

9 Dr Dorothy Jordan Lloyd

Professor J. Murray Luck

Mr C. Forster Cooper

10 Mile Eliane LeBreton

11 Professor J. B. Leathes

12 Dr Irvine Page

13 Dr Elsie Watchorn

14 Dr Barnet Woolf

Mr J. B. S. Haldane

15 Dr Howard Florey

16 Dr Leslie J. Harris

Dr A. L. Bacharach

18 Dr Howard Whittle

19 Mr C. F. A. Pantin

Professor A. R. Moore & Mrs Moore

20 Dr John Hammond

21 Dr St G. Huggett

22 Dr Arthur Walton

23 Dr Barbara Holmes

24 Dr F. H. A. Marshall

Epilegomena

Professor L. G. M. B. Becking

Dr D. Keilin

Dr G. S. Carter

Professor Lancelot Hogben

Mr G. R. de Beer

Professor A. R. Moore & Mrs Moore

Appendix III Dr L. E. S. Eastham

I am indebted to the Master of Gonville and Caius College for permission to reproduce the portrait of William Harvey (attributed to Rembrandt) in the Senior Combination Room. Finally, I am glad to record here my gratitude to the StafTof the Cambridge University Press for the unremitting care which they gave to my book during the course of its preparation.

J. N.

Note: The use of the shortened and (&) indicates collaboration between two or more authors.

Prolegomena

The Sciences, unlike the Graces or the Eumenides, are not limited in number. Once born, they are immortal, but, as knowledge increases, they are ever multiplying, and so great is now the dominion of the scientific mind that every few years sees a new one brought into the world. Some spring, fully armed, from the brains of one or two men of genius, but most of them, perhaps, come only gradually to their full development through the labours of very many obscure and accurate observers.

If the analogy may be permitted, physico-chemical embryology has so far been living an intra-uterine existence. Its facts have been buried in a wide range of scientific journals, and its theories have lain dormant or in potentia in reviews of modest scope. Physicochemical embryology has, indeed, arrived at the stage immediately priox to birth, and all it needs is a skilful obstetrician, for, when once it has reached the light of day and has passed for ever out of the foetal stage, it will be well able to take care of itself. This obstetrical task is that which I have chosen and obviously enough it divides into three principal heads: first, to collect together out of all the original papers on the subject the facts which are known about the physico-chemical basis of embryonic development; second, to relate these facts to each other and to the facts derived from the labours of investigators in morphological embryology and " Entwicklungsmechanik," and, third, to ascertain whether, from what is at present known, any generally valid principles emerge.

I may as well say at the outset that in order to do this certain arbitrary boundary-lines are inevitable. The following arrangement has been adopted. Chronologically speaking, the prelude to all embryonic development is the maturation of the egg-cell, but this is not strictly embryology, and so has been relegated to an appendix. The egg-cell as a physico-chemical system is dealt with at the opening of Part III, and thereafter the physico-chemical aspects of development follow in order. No mention will be made of fertilisation, for this has been treated exhaustively by other writers (Lillie, Dalcq) and, after all, embryology presupposes fertiUsation whether natural or artificial. Nor in later chapters will any complete treatment be given of the events going on in the maternal organism during pregnancy : for the present purpose the discussion will go as far into the mother as the placenta but no farther. Again, hatching or birth will put an end to the discourse as to the foetal state itself, save that, in the cases of animals which hatch before the yolk-sac is absorbed, their embryonic life is assumed to end when they first take food for themselves. Appendices are added dealing with the plant embryo and the insect pupa, which, in the later stages of metamorphosis, have points both of resemblance to and of difference from the growth of the embryo. It is natural to hope that the outcome of all this labour may be an increase of interest among biologists in this section of their domain, and a great accession to the number of those investigators who devote their energies to actual experiments in this new field.

For it must be confessed that it is a new field. It has been opened up in very gradual stages: fitful and sporadic experiments on the constitution of embryonic tissues in the seventeenth century, a gradual growth of knowledge about the chemical composition of eggs in the eighteenth, a big increase of activity in the early nineteenth; d'lTxiug which appear the first observations on the physico-chemical changes taking place in the embryo during its development, and then in our own time a mass of very widely scattered work bringing the subject up to the "obstetrical" stage. Such a work as this, in my opinion, should not be compared with laboratory experiments in a derogatory sense, for, while it is true that facts are the ultimate court of appeal in any scientific discussion, yet at the same time the number of investigators has grown to such extraordinary proportions in this century that some danger exists lest we should be so busily engaged in accumulating new facts as to be left with no time at all to devote any thought to those we have already. Classification, indexing, and maturer consideration about the facts we actually possess are at least as great a need at the present moment as the invention of new facts. "Everyone must realise", says Eugenio Rignano, "how much this theoretical elaboration, performed by means of analyses and comparisons, of generalisations and hypotheses controlled and verified by the correspondence of facts with the results of the reasoning, is useful and necessary if one wishes to reach a progressive systematisation and an ever more synthetic vision of the confused mass of facts which experimentalists pour daily in a continuous stream into the scientific market."

My predecessors in this work have been few in number. The volumes of Haller's, Buffon's, and Milne-Edwards' great treatises, in which they deal with the phenomena of generation, contain as much information as was available up to 1863, but this is purely of historical interest to us. In 1885, W. Preyer, Professor of Physiology at Jena, published his Spezielle Physiologie des Embryo, which still remains a most valuable review, and indeed, even to-day, is the only existing book specially devoted to embryonic physiology. The present century has produced only three books which even touch upon my subject, namely, T. B. Robertson's Chemical Basis of Growth and Senescence, F. H. A. Marshall's Physiology of Reproduction and E. Faure-Fremiet's La Cinetique du Developpement. The first of these was admittedly written to support a particular theory, and in any case says comparatively little about physico-chemical embryology. The second and the third deal with it only as a constituent part of a much wider field. In Marshall's case, the whole array of facts relating to oestrus and breeding, fertilisation and fertility, lactation and sex determination, have to be dealt with, and only three chapters out of sixteen are devoted to the subject of this book. The first of these is contributed by W. Cramer, and covers the biochemistry of the sexual organs, including the unfertiUsed egg ; the second, which deals with foetal nutrition and the placenta, is by J. Lochhead ; and the third, by these two investigators together, is concerned with changes in the maternal organism during pregnancy. Admirable as these chapters are, they are now rather out of date. Moreover, though one or two corners of the field I have before me were covered in Marshall's book, it was from a quite different standpoint.

Faure-Fremiet's work is exactly analogous; it deals with physicochemical embryology only, as it were, in passing. The relevant discussion takes up only two chapters out of seven ; the rest are occupied with tissue culture, growth of protozoal populations, and general cytology. His book covers, it might be said, the third and fourth corners : all the main expanse of the field remains.

Thus neither of these books deals with physico-chemical embryology in an exhaustive and comprehensive fashion, treating it as, in my view, it ought to be treated, with the thoroughness which is deserved by a new branch of natural knowledge. Inseparable, however, from thoroughness of treatment is the submergence of the parts of more general interest under a mass of detail, and it may be well therefore, to mention now what sections of the book could be said to be most valuable to any student of general biology. Part i comes in this class, and of Part iii, the middle portion of Section i, all of Sections 2, 3, and 5, thelatter half of Section 7, Sections 8, 9 (especially the end), 11, possibly 18, and finally the Epilegomena.

For my models in the preparation of this book, if it is permissible to name them, I have taken, Growth and Form by d'Arcy Thompson, surely the most scholarly work produced by a biologist in our time, and The Physiology of Reproduction by F. H. A. Marshall, already mentioned, which showed to all successors, in my opinion, how a colossal array of facts can be welded together into an absorbing and readable book, I am conscious that I shall not attain the level of these classics of modern biology, but then

.... Pauci, quos aequus amavit Jupiter, aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus.

The progress of any branch of natural knowledge can be best described as a continual pilgrimage towards the quantitative. QuaUties can never be altogether left out of account and this is what makes it impossible for science to achieve its end with absolute finality. Yet an association with the probably unattainable is common to all the great types of man's activity. But "Fuyez toujours les a peu pres", as O. W. Holmes used to put it, is a proper maxim for the scientific mind, and whatever this book can do towards making embryology an exact science will be its final justification.

Cite this page: Hill, M.A. (2024, April 16) Embryology Book - Chemical embryology 1 (1900). Retrieved from https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php/Book_-_Chemical_embryology_1_(1900)

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Book - Chemical embryology 1 (1900)

Contents

Chemical Embryology - Volume One

Contents

Acknowledgements of Indebtedness

Prolegomena