THE liberal spirit in which the laboratory of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh is thrown open to workers in every department of biology that bears, however remotely, upon medicine is worthy of the highest praise. That the opportunity for research thus afforded has been appreciated is well shown by this record of the work done in the laboratory during the second year of its existence. Sixteen papers are included in the volume, many of them anatomical and gynæcological, some pathological, one morphological (on the stomach of the Narwhal), and others (while including the results of studies in the laboratory) in the main clinical. This very diversity renders criticism difficult. Taking a high critical standpoint and employing as a standard the volumes which emanate from laboratories devoted to one subject—the Reports of the Physiological Laboratory of University College, London, or the studies from the Biological Laboratories of Cambridge or of Owens College, for example—it would be easy to find fault, to indicate papers that ought scarcely to be included, and to discover the absence of any series of allied researches of high scientific value, such as might be expected to be turned out in some special field of work, were the laboratory already long established, and were it given up to one branch of science, rather than intended from the first to be of use for investigations in all branches of biology. Yet to judge the volume from such a standpoint would be unfair both to the promoters of the laboratory and to those working within it. Taking medicine alone—that is to say, as apart from surgery and gynæ cology—its extent is so considerable, and the topics dealt with so varied, that all original investigations, even if of equally high practical value, cannot be of equal scientific import: when surgery and gynæcology are also included, it is yet more obvious that much of the work that is rightly performed in the laboratory, while capable of almost immediate application to clinical practice, will be of a nature that does not necessarily call for great powers of original research. Clinical importance equally with scientific value must determine the inclusion of articles in such a volume as this. Herein, indeed, lies the only valid criticism that can be directed against these reports: if they be published purely as evidence of the activity of the laboratory, they well fulfil their purpose; but it is a little difficult to see what other use they possess. From the very diversity of the investigations, the reports cannot be expected to rank as useful additions to the library of the specialist in any of the subjects treated; there is too much extraneous matter. The gynæcologist will reap little benefit from the latter half of the volume, the pathologist will fail to appreciate the niceties of frozen sections of the lower portion of the body, cut in different planes. If such reports are to be of value to other workers, rather than, as I have said, as evidence of activity, they must be issued in separate parts, and, what is of still greater importance, they must assuredly not be issued at regular intervals. Successful as the laboratory has been up to the present, it is impossible to manufacture always a definite quantity of original work per annum and to order, and if it is intended to publish so many hundred pages at the expiration of every year, then it is only to be expected that many of those pages will either be work not of the highest quality, or will be upon subjects incompletely matured. Reports from the Laboratory of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh. Vol. II. (Edinburgh and London: Young J. Pentland, 1890.)