BIOLOGICAL TIME By Lecomte de Noiiy
The account of M. de Noiiy's work, begun during the War, on the rate of healing of wounds, in which he found that apart from special factors (festering, size and shape of wound, &c.) the rate was constant for a given age of the patient and roughly in inverse propor- tion to it—all this is admirable and very interesting ; it would be a good thing if most scientists who find an important generalisation would describe the busy but casual Steps by which a man tumbles on one. But M. de Nody has only done it because he has swallowed M. Bergson—not that that does him any harm, it only fills the end of this book (Methuen, 7s. 6d.) with nonsense about how time isn't real, and then again is much too real, and anyway has nothing to do with clocks. It seems enough to say that the thing which has nothing to do with clocks had better not be called time. But there is no need to quarrel with the philosophy so far as it induced the author to write a charming and informative small book ; except that he ought to have kept space to say how his "planimeter worked, that meas- ured the area of the wounds.
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