ed considerably in intensity. The large fragment beat 40 times
a minute and the little fragment 90 times. The culture was washed and
placed in a new medium. An hour and a half after, the pulsations had
become very strong. The large fragment contracted 120 times a minute
and the small fragment 160 times. At the same time the fragments grew
rapidly. At the end of eight hours they were united and formed a mass
of which all the parts beat synchronically."

Experiments to date seem to establish that the connective tissue, at
any rate, is "immortal."

From this research, it is possible to arrive at certain logical
conclusions, which, however, it remains for the future to confirm. One,
and the most important, is that the normal circulation of the blood
does not succeed in freeing all the waste products of the tissues, and
that this is the cause of senility and death. Were science to find some
way to wash the tissues in the living organism as they have been washed
in these cultures, man's life might be indefinitely prolonged.

R. LEGENDRE

The Nobel prize in medicine for 1912 has just been awarded to Dr.
Alexis Carrel, a Frenchman, of Lyon, now employed at the Rockefeller
Institute of New York, for his entire work relating to the suture of
vessels and the transplantation of organs.

The remarkable results obtained in these fields by various
experimenters, of whom Carrel is most widely known, and also the
wonderful applications made of them by certain surgeons have already
been widely published.

The journals have frequently spoken lately of "cultures" of tissues
detached from the organism to which they belonged; and some of them,
exaggerating the results already obtained, have stated that it is now
possible to make living tissues grow and increase when so detached.

Having given these subjects much study I wish to state here what has
already been done and what we may hope to accomplish. As a matter of
fact we do not yet know how to construct living cells; the forms
obtained with mineral substances by Errera, Stephane Leduc, and others,
have only a remote resemblance to those of life; neither do we know how
to prevent death; but yet it is interesting to know that it is possible
to prolong for some time the life of organs, tissues, and cells after
they have been removed from the organism.

The idea of preserving the life of greater or lesser parts of an
organism occurred at about the same time to a number of persons, a