DEFINING BIOLOGY
Lectures from the 1890s.
Jane Maienschein, ed. Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA, 1 986. 352 pp.
$25.
Every Friday evening during the summer season at the Marine Bio logical Laboratory in Woods Hole, there is a general lecture for the scientific community on some aspect of biology. This custom dates from the laboratory's founding. During the 1890s, seven volumes of these lectures were published. Defining Biology reprints 10 of the lectures; they serve as a peg on which Jane Maienschein hangs an introductory essay in which she describes the early history of the laboratory and the special role of C.O. Whitman, its first director, in establishing what she regards as the initial intellectual ethos of the place.
Six of the lectures deal with issues in the field of developmental biology. These lectures include the prospectus W. Roux wrote for his new journal, Archiv fur Entwick lungsmechanik der Organismen,...
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