BOOK REVIEWS INVESTIGATION OF RATES AND MECHANISMS OF REACTION, edited by S. L. Friess and A. Weissberger. Interscience Publishers, Inc., New York 1, N.Y. 1953. 760 pages, size 6 X 9 inches, illustrated and indexed. Price $12.50. This is Volume VIII of a series entitled Technique of Organic Chem- istry, to which fifteen contributors add their knowledge and skill for a total of ten chapters. A six-page symbol index at the opening of the book is a thoughtful and useful addition. Four chapters go into detail on various organic reaction rate data, including the use of tagged isotopes and interpretation of findings. A forty-two page chapter reviews biological reactions •n its many intricacies. This volume and its predecessors are not for the neophyte chemist. They are excellent references.-- M. G. DENAVARRE. A FUENCH-ENoLISH DICTIONARY FOR CHEMISTS, by Austin M. Pat- terson. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York 16, N.Y. 1954. 476 pages, size 51/4 X 7l/4 inches. Price $6.50. This is the second edition of a popular chemist's "right-hand" dic- tionary. Words are labeled as to their field of application as Bact., Pharm., etc. Four pages of intro- duction help the user in getting the most out of the dictionary. The test of any dictionary is the presence of a representative group of words used in an industry or profes- sion if it is a specialized tome. As far as this industry is concerned words such as immortelle, moussant, cellulite, broyage, abeille, poil, moyeu, ongle, and faro are all present. In fact this reviewer's knowledge of French requires the use of a dictionary and therefore he finds this book valuable. The book is of a size that is easily handled. The binding is chosen for plenty of wear. You will find it a useful tool in your work.--M. G. DE•[AVAR RE. STATISTICAL METHODS FOR CHEMI- CAL EXPERIMENTATION, by W. L. Gore. Interscience Publishers, Inc., New York 1, N.Y. 1952. 210 pages, 5 X 7 inches, indexed. Price $3.30. This book is divided into seven chapters: Introduction, Statistical Concepts, The Reliability of Esti- mates, Analysis of Variance, Design of Experiments, Correlation and Re- gression, Attribute Statistics. Except in the chapter on the de- sign of experiments, the author is mainly interested in defining various statistics and statistical methods and, in the case of the methods, giving examples of their uses. "No at.te.mpt has been made to show the ong•n or mathematical relationships of the formulae used," as the author says in the preface. In the chapter on design of experiments the author points out the basic attributes of good experiments and describes some of the statistical pitfalls into which 419

•20 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS an experimenter may fall and ways to avoid them. Tables of basic statistical function (i.e., normal distribution areas, Chi- square, etc.) are included in the ap- pendix. However, although these tables are referred to quite often in the illustrative examples in the text, the use of most of the tables is not very clearly indicated. There are also many numerical errors in the illustrative examples and occasional errors of f•ct (e.g., Y=aP 2 plus bT 2 is given as an example of a case where the variables P and T "interact" in the determination of Y). Never- theless, this book should serve as a useful basic text for chemists who wish to apply statistical methods to their experimentation.--RuTH R BiF. s, Good Housekeeping'. INDUSTRIAL FERMENTATIONS• Vol. I, Edited by Leland A. Under- kofier and Richard J. Hickey. Chemical Publishing Company, New York 10, N.Y., 1954. 565 pages. Price $12. It is probable that the organic chemical industry began with the production of aicoholic beverages and vinegar. What began as an art has developed into as precise a science as biological variation will allow. This book is the first of a two-volume symposium which will consider the microbiological proc- esses of major industrial impor- tance. Its value to those in the industry is subject to the usual limitations imposed upon all ref- erence books on industrial chem- istry. Competition requires that details be kept secret. Competi- tion also results in such rapid tech- nological advances as to insure the obsolescence of a chapter even as it is being written. The chapters concerned with the venerable tech- niques for the production of al- coholic beverages suffer less from obsolescence than the others on the production of industrial chemicals by microorganisms. The chemist with no experience in the field will find most of his questions-logically treated and systematically answered. To insure this the editors have attempted to induce the several authors to conform to an outline to avoid a lack of continuity of style. The attempt was not entirely suc- cessful. The alcoholic fermentation proc- esses considered include the pro- duction of wine and of beer the production of ethanol from grain, molasses, sulfite-waste-liquor, and wood waste the butanol-acetone fermentation and the production of glycerol. Two chapters describe the production of commercial, and food and feed yeast. The remain- der of the book is devoted to dis- cussions of the production of citric, lactic, gluconic, iraconic and fu- maric acids and vinegar. Those who realize the serious threat imposed by the growing problem of feeding the world will find the model of an ideal solution described in the chapter on the production of food and feed yeast. The economical conversion of in- edible wastes into high quality protein would appear to be a task for which the yeast cell is ideally suited.--P. H. HID¾, Commercial Solvents Corp. DAS CHLOROPHYLL IN MEDIZIN UND KOSMETIK, by Hans Vogel. Verlag Hans Carl, Nurnberg, Ger- many, 1954. 151 pages, 5 X 71/2 inches, indexed. Price 7.5 DM. This interesting book of what was a "grand" project a year or two ago covers the main drug and cosmetic uses of chlorophyll. The book is divided into three parts, namely, chlorophyll in medicine and cos- metics--eighty pages, chlorophyll