The cell in development and heredity / by Edmund B. Wilson.

  • Wilson, Edmund B. (Edmund Beecher), 1856-1939.
Date:
1925
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The cell in development and heredity / by Edmund B. Wilson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/1288 (page VII)
    PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION This volume is the outcome of a course of lectures, delivered at Columbia University in the winter of 1892-93, in which I endeavored to give to an audience of general university students some account of recent advances in cellular biology, and more especially to trace the steps by which the prob¬ lems of evolution have been reduced to problems of the cell. It was my first intention to publish these lectures in a simple and general form, in the hope of showing to wider circles how the varied and apparently heteroge¬ neous cell-researches of the past twenty years have grown together in a coherent group, at the heart of which are a few elementary phenomena, and how these phenomena, easily intelligible even to those having no special knowledge of the subject, are related to the problems of development. Such a treatment was facilitated by the appearance, in 1893, of Oscar Hertwig's invaluable book on the cell, which brought together, in a form well designed for the use of special students, many of the more important results of modern cell-research. I am glad to acknowledge my debt to Hertwig's book; but it is proper to state that the present volume was fully sketched in its main outlines at the time the Zelle und Gewebe appeared. Its completion was, however, long delayed by investigations which I undertook in order to re¬ examine the history of the centrosomes in the fertilization of the egg,— a subject which had been thrown into such confusion by Fol's extraordinary account of the Quadrille of Centres in echinoderms that it seemed for a time impossible to form any definite conception of the cell in its relation to inheritance. By a fortunate coincidence the same task was independently undertaken, nearly at the same time, by several other investigators. The concordant results of these researches led to a decisive overthrow of Fol's conclusions, and the way was thus cleared for a return to the earlier and juster views founded by Hertwig, Strasburger, and Van Beneden, and so lucidly and forcibly developed by Boveri. The rapid advance of discovery in the meantime has made it seem de¬ sirable to amplify the original plan of the work, in order to render it useful to students as well as to more general readers; and to this end it has been found necessary to go over a considerable part of the ground already so well covered by Hertwig.^ This book does not, however, in any manner aim to ^ Henneguy's Leçons sur la cellule is received, too late for further notice, as this volume is going through the press.