THE BIOLOGY OF THE CELL SURFACE
by Ernest Everett Just '07. P. Blakiston's Son & Co., Philadelphia, Pa.392 pages, #5.50.
This book represents the views of a biologist who has worked for over twentyfive years on the eggs of marine animals. Inasmuch as the cell is the elemental structural and functional unit of plant and animal life these studies on the intact normal life-unit are of wide interest not only in the field of pure biology but to such applied branches as medical science and agriculture as well. Dr. Just sees the problems of biology as standing apart from those of chemistry and physics because of the inability of one to subject a living system to minute analysis without destroying that which is under investigation. This leaves the biologist who is well-armed with a good microscope better equip!: to deal with the properties and manifestations of the living organism than the more exact analyst who must confine his activities to the non-living or recently killed systems.
With the use of this purely biological attack such fundamental life problems as the nature of the protoplasmic system, fertilization, parthenogenesis, cell division, cleavage and differentiation, chromosome behavior and evolution have been investigated. In the mechanism of all these processes great importance is placed upon the cell surface and the outer layer of the cytoplasm which act as the barriers between the living protoplasm and the ever-changing environment, regulating the ingress of all materials vital to the living cell, maintaining the constancy of the internal cellular medium and standing as a buffer against the attacks of the cell's surroundings. Also, in the egg he shows that without the ectoplasm fertilization cannot take place, that the ectoplasm initiates cell division by regulating the movements within the cytoplasm, that the ectoplasm is one of the causative factors in differentiation of development, that the behavior of the chromosomes is dependent upon ectoplasmic activity, and finally that ecto-endoplasmic differentiation is a factor in evolution.
Despite his emphasis upon the importance of the ectoplasm in regulating the actions of the living system he makes his position clear that "life resides in the whole of the protoplasmic system taken as a unit—the phenomena of life are not to be dissociated from the integration of the system's constituent regions, the integration which is the basic manifestation of the state of being alive." He believes that these studies on the normal-cells should be extended to include pathological conditions where an exhaustive study of the minute structure of human cells may lend a new understanding to such diseases as oedema and all pathological states resulting from a disturbed water balance, those diseases associated with a change in the quality and number of white cells, and cancer.
