In spite of the spectacular advances in scientific medicine which we have witnessed in the last 20 years, there is still a need for information about a number of fundamental, if quite elementary, matters. One of these is the chemical composition of the human body. A knowledge of the quantitative make-up of the bodies of men, women, and children in both health and disease is of value for investigations of the most diverse types, but much of the information available is the result of guess work rather than chemistry. It is proposed to describe the results of an attempt to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge.Von Bezold (1857, 1858) was the first to make an analysis of a human foetus. It weighed 523 g., and he determined both organic and inorganic constituents. During the next 50 years a number of analyses were made, mostly in Germany and France, though one paper from Italy and one from Holland were published. Fehling (1877) studied 21 foetuses varying in weight from 1 to 3,294 g. He was interested only in the amounts of water, nitrogen, and fat, but most workers included inorganic constituents in their analyses (

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The call for a reprint of this volume within seven months of its publication must be most gratifying to the Editors and their collaborators, and is ample proof that it has filled a gap in medical literature. Although the work suffers, like all such compilations in which many authors take part, from a certain degree of overlapping and from a varying degree of thoroughness with which the different subjects are treated, and although, in spite of its claims, it does not appear to us to be any more rationalistic or decisive in its recommendations than the average text-book on medicine, it can be recommended as a reliable guide to present-day therapeutics in certain groups of diseased conditions. THE CHEMICAL COMPOSITIONOF FOODS.

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