An Open Air Anatomist
Life and Living. By Frederic Wood Jones, F.R.S. (Kegan Paul los. 6d.)
IN the nine chapters of his new book, Professor Wood Jones has re-assembled some of the most original and inspiring addresses that have been given to any audience by any anatomist of his generation. It is probably true to say that nobody but Professor. Wood Jones could possibly have written this book because, in addition to the general reading of which he professes so little and carries so lightly, he is philosopher, traveller, field naturalist, embryologist, and physician, as well as being one of the world's leading exponents of human anatomy. He has sojourned on coral islands, lectured to medical students in London, Australia and China, and is now lecturing to them in Manchester. He has obviously really loved and understood almost every kind of living animal, including homo sapiens ; and to every problem of the labora- tory, the dissecting room, and the wild life that he has so intimately studied in so many continents he has brought an eye and mind that have steadfastly refused to be hypnotised by any particular school of scientific thought.
He has himself escape.. from the mechanistic' and materialist dogmas that overshadowed the anatomy and bio- logy of his youth ; and no reader, whether or not he • is a scientist, could be other than enthralled with the story of his exodus and what brought it about as implied and illus- trated in the chapters on Anatomy and a Life Principle, Life and Growth, Mechanism or Vitalism.
In so rich a book it is hard to pick and choose. But it is good to find again in its pages The Changing Point of View, the Bancroft Memorial Lecture delivered by him at Brisbane, which is probably the finest and most fascinating example of what such a lecture should be that modern times have to offer. Nor should any doctor, or anybody in any way interested in medicine, fail to read his provocative but convincing address on Disease and Individuality, a Listerian oration originally delivered in Adelaide. It will probably be found—and this is a book which will be being read fifty and a hundred years from now—that few men have done more, in his own field, to mould the thought and mode of thinking of future genera- tions than Professor Wood Jones—not least, perhaps, because he is as happy on what to most other people would be a desert island as in the robes of a professor turning a state occasion into a true adventure of the spirit. To everybody interested in mankind I would say buy this book if you possibly can
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