The Physical Basis of Heredity

Philadelphia and London: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1919. First edition, first printing.

TH MORGAN'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE PIONEERING SERIES OF MONOGRAPHS BRIDGING EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY.

8 inches tall hardcover, red cloth binding, title of the series (Monographs on Experimental Biology) embossed top of cover, gilt title to spine, signature of A. C. Redfield to front free endpaper, 305 pp, 117 illustrations. Light wear to cover corners and spine ends, binding tight, text bright and unmarked. Very good in custom archival mylar cover. EDITORS' ANNOUNCEMENT "The rapid increase of specialization makes it impossible for one anthor to cover satisfactorily the whole aeld of modern Biology. This situation, which exists in all the sciences, has induced English authors to issue series of monographs in Biochemistry, Physiology, and Physics. A number of American biologists have decided to provide the same opportunity for the study of Experimental Biology. Biology, which not long ago was purely descriptive and speculative, has begun to adopt the methods of the exact sciences, recognizing that for permanent progress not only experiments are required but quantitative experiments. It will be the purpose of this series of monographs to emphasize and further as much as possible this developsment of Biology. Experimental Biology and Greneral Physiology are one and the same science, in method as well as content, since both aim at explaining life from the physico-chemical connstitution of living matter. The series of monographs Experimental Biology will therefore include the field of traditional General Physiology." Jacques Loeb, T. H. Morgan, W. J. V. Osterhout.

THOMAS HUNT MORGAN (1866 - 1945) was an American embryologist, geneticist, and evolutionary biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role that the chromosome plays in heredity. Morgan received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in zoology in 1890 and researched embryology during his tenure at Bryn Mawr. Following the rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance in 1900, Morgan began to study the genetic characteristics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In his famous Fly Room at Columbia University, Morgan demonstrated that genes are carried on chromosomes and are the mechanical basis of heredity. These discoveries formed the basis of the modern science of genetics.

PROVENANCE: ALFRED CLARENCE REDFIELD (1890 – 1983) was an American oceanographer known for having discovered the Redfield ratio, which describes the ratio between nutrients in plankton and ocean water. During the years 1930 to 1970, Redfield was intimately involved with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. During the 1930s, Redfield made his most important discovery: that the atomic ratios of the chemical components of phosphorus, nitrogen and carbon atoms are identical with their relative proportions in the open ocean. This idea was used to explain some characteristics of the carbon life cycle in the sea.