[In the following review, May recounts Ramón y Cajal 's life and scientific accomplishments, then considers the aphorisms in Charlas de café.]

Among living biologists there is certainly no greater genius than S. Ramón y Cajal, the eminent Spanish histologist and neurologist. And were genius to be judged not only by the results achieved, but also by the difficulties overcome, Ramón y Cajal would stand preeminent among them all.

Ramón y Cajal began his scientific career at a time when Spain was almost totally unproductive of any original scientific investigation. Urged as much by patriotic zeal as by the feu sacré of research, he has succeeded, in the forty-five years since his first publication, in creating a great Spanish school of histology and neurology, in actively stimulating investigators in related fields of science, and in foreign countries, and in pointing a way to Spain, by his noble example, to a new era of scientific endeavour.

The son of a country physician, a man who had risen by his own efforts and knew the value of work, Santiago Ramón y Cajal was born in 1852, in Petilla de Aragón, in the province of Navarra. He was brought up in small towns in various provinces of Spain. As is the case with so many men of genius, his early years were passed in open opposition to the formal education of books and masters, and in close study of nature. This early took the form of a great love for pictorial art, for which he appears to have had great talent. His aesthetic tendencies were actively combatted, however, by his parents, who saw in them merely the expression of laziness, especially as the young Santiago was known wherever he went as the leader of all the boyish pranks of the neighborhood. These pranks, under the energetic guidance of their son, ran the gamut from the explosion of wooden canons to stone fights with the police. To curb these youthful outbursts, Dr. Ramón placed his son as apprentice, first to a barber, then to a shoemaker.

Synchronous with his exuberant energy, however, the young Santiago Ramón was experiencing a great fever of romanticism. Guided by his love for art, and by French and Spanish authors of the romantic era, he was an ardent worshipper of Chateaubriand, Hugo and Quevedo. It is with these masters, and largely outside of the standard education of the schools, that he grew up to adolescence.

His father constantly urged him to take up the profession of medicine, and to get rid of his artistic ideas. To incite him to work along medical lines, he began with his son the study of anatomy, and more especially that of osteology. To Santiago, with his artistic idiosyncracy, osteology was but another pictoric theme, a theme which, although it dealt with hard and dry realities, he espoused with far greater enthusiasm than the dialectics and metaphysic of his school masters. Here, so he says, working on dry bones in an attic, under the tutorship of his father, was laid the basis of all his future scientific activity.

Once he had finished with the secondary schools, the young man studied medicine in Zaragoza. There was at the time an almost absolute lack of laboratories in Spain, and medicine was merely a clinical study. Zaragoza, as one of the smaller medical schools, offered no particularly great advantages. Here, however, Ramón y Cajal made a profound study of gross anatomy, and soon became extremely competent in this science.

His medical studies completed, he had to serve his country in the army; he was accepted in the medical corps and, after a brief campaign in Spain, was sent to Cuba to serve in the war against the insurgents of 1874. There, under fearful sanitary conditions, he soon fell a victim to malaria, and was saved from death only through his extraordinary physique and resistance. He returned to Spain and, after his recovery, prepared himself for a professorship. Once more, however, disease laid a heavy hand on him, this time in the form of pulmonary tuberculosis. The extraordinary energy which he had stored up in his boy-hood and adolescence here again came to his rescue, and, because of his tremendous "élan vital," he triumphed a second time over disease. Having passed competitive examinations, he was appointed Professor of Descriptive Anatomy at the University of Valencia.

It was during his preparation for a professorship that he began to take an interest in microscopic anatomy and its technique; working always by himself, and pushed only by his own curiosity and enthusiasm, he founded a small laboratory of his own. Once a professor in Valencia, he began a series of investigations in histology which can be said to be the most brilliant of modern times. His maiden studies were on inflammation, nerve terminations, the structure of the cholera vibrio, that of stratified pavement epithelium, the crystalline lens, cartilage, bone, and muscle. He soon drifted over, however, to a study of various structures of the nervous system, and especially, at first, the retina. Using the newly discovered method of Golgi, which is specific for the nervous system, he modified it so that in his hands it gave results which no one had been able to obtain before him. We can say that no part of the nervous system of vertebrates has been left unstudied by Ramón y Cajal. Beginning with a beautiful comparative study of the retina, which culminated in his publication, in 1892, of "La rétine des vertébrés" in La Cellule, he successively studied, throughout the vertebrate series, the spinal cord, the medulla, the cerebellum, the various integrating parts of the cerebrum, the sympathetic nervous system, the peripheral nerves, the sense organs. These studies, undertaken on embryos, young animals, and adults, found their completion in an elaborate investigation of the human cerebral cortex, which Cajal found to be quite different from that of lower mammals.

During this period of morphological investigation, Cajal did not leave aside theoretical considerations. Among the most important which he put forth, one may count his theory of neurotropism, to explain, in part, the growth and connections of the nervous system, and the theory of the dynamic polarisation of the nerve cell, according to which the dendrites carry cellulipetal impulses, while the axon is used for cellulifugal ones. This later theory was also expounded by Van Gehuchten, the celebrated Belgian neurologist. Ramón y Cajal also made most of the observations which finally led to the proposition of the neurone doctrine by Waldeyer. According to this theory, now universally accepted, the nervous system, except for very rare exceptions, is made up of discrete elements which are merely contiguous to each other, but never continuous.

Ramón y Cajal was professor, after leaving Valencia, at Barcelona, and finally at Madrid. Here he founded his Revista Trimestrial Micrográfica, which became, in later years, the Trabajos del Laboratorio de Investigaciones Biológicas de la Universidad de Madrid. In this review he and his students have published, and continue to publish, some of the most important contributions to biology of modern times.

Cajal's studies on the morphology of the nervous system of vertebrates are beautifully resumed and extended in his Textura del sistema nervioso del hombre y de los vertebrados (1897-1904), translated by L. Azoulay and amplified by Cajal in 1909-11 as Histologie du système nerveux de l'homme et des vertébrés. His later studies deal with: 1. The cytology of the nervous system. He developed for this study the method of impregnation which, bears his name, and which is one of the very best specific methods for the nervous system. He studied the neurofibrillar system, the Golgi apparatus, the finer cytoplasmic constituents of nerve cells, etc. 2. Degeneration and regeneration in the nervous system of vertebrates, especially mammals. This study covers once again the entire nervous system, and is an experimental counter-part of his earlier purely morphological studies. He shed much light on this much belabored, and yet badly known theme. His long studies are resumed in a book: Estudios sobre la degeneración y regeneración del sistema nervioso (1913-14) which has been translated into English by R. M. May, and is about to be published. 3. The nervous system of invertebrates, and more especially the visual structures; these highly important studies, still being continued, have helped to an immense extent in the understanding of the very complex nervous structures of the lower phyla, a field which had been but little studied by other investigators.

Besides these studies, which follow a general trend of investigation, Cajal has published numerous special studies on neuroglia, ependyma, muscle fibers, blood, bacteria, special methods in neurology and photography, etc. Up to 1923 he had published 14 books and 252 original investigations. His work has been extensively translated into French and German, but little of it has seen the light in English.

Among the main honors which Ramón y Cajal has received one may cite the Moscow prize of the International Medical Congress, the Croonian Lectureship of the Royal Society of London, the lectures at Clark University in 1899, the Helmholtz Medal of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, the Nobel prize, doctorates and decorations from all parts of the world, fellowship in all important scientific societies, etc. His students have been numerous and excellent, and some of them, like F. Tello and Rio-Hortega, have now taken their place among the world's best investigators in biology. The list of their studies, as well as Cajal's own, up to 1923, are appended to Recuerdos de mi vida.

But besides being a very great biologist, Ramón y Cajal is also an able littérateur and philosopher. In the second book which we review here, Charlas de café, which may be liberally translated as Café Conversation, he exposes some of his ideas on friendship and hate, love and women, old age and pain, death, immortality and glory, genius and dumbness, conversation, polemics and opinions, character, morals and customs, pedagogy, literature and art, politics, war, society, humor, etc. The book is composed of more or less disconnected thoughts which have occurred to the author throughout his life, and especially in the stimulating atmosphere of the cafés which he was wont to frequent. A résumé of these thoughts is an impossibility, and we may give only some of the more outstanding and sagacious among them:

"Other conditions being equal, the coefficient of honorability of actresses and cabaret singers is in an inverse ratio to the diameter of their jewels."—"Although the case is rare, one sees bright and even beautiful women married to imbeciles. Is it to elevate them or to depress them? The latter appears more probable than the former. Unlike the donkey of Apuleius, who recovered the human form after eating a rose, these unhappy men eat a rose to become donkeys."—"When we are young we think: I 'am immortal'. When we are old we say: I 'die without having lived', or, sadder still, I 'have not known how to live'. And we would think the same if our life lasted the two hundred years of an elephant or the three hundred of a crocodile."—"Inexorable death sometimes surprises us as it does female Hymenoptera which, once they have terminated the nuptial flight, are often devoured by birds. If heaven reserves such a fate for us, let us pray that it may at least allow us to give birth to some noble and ideal creation. Nor should we fear to leave the work incomplete: once the egg of truth is laid, someone will be there to incubate it. The really tragic thing is to fall before the spiritual wings have sprouted, our brain swollen with immature germina."—"From the depths of eternity human heads must appear to the psychological principle of the universe like those bubbles which are formed on the wave as it breaks against the shore. They shine a moment with polychrome hues, they copy in miniature the azure's blue and the magic of the landscape, and they break a second later, giving way to the new generation of iridescent globules."—"I have noted that even in the most deeply religious minds there remains a sediment of philosophic doubt. If they were absolutely persuaded of the immortality of the spirit, would they applaud the subtle allegations of intuitive philosophers, and would they be complacent concerning the pretended communications from the dead which are referred to by spiritualists, fakirs, and theosophists? Who looks for allies when he is certain of victory?"—"Glory is like a woman: we pursue her if she is disdainful of us, we disdain her if it is us whom she prefers."—"In countries of gray skies there is an abundance of gray matter."—"Like the highest peaks, which emerge only from mountain chains, scientific or artistic geniuses arise only from the high plateaus of general culture."—"May Heaven keep me from discussing philosophic or scientific questions with lawyers. This type of polemist is rarely interested in being right, but rather on defending his client. And the client may be God, free will, immortality of the soul, or else positivism, pantheism, spiritism, socialism, etc. Before these modern sophists, any adversary will have his rôle reduced merely to that of oratorical opponent or trainer."—"The greatest workers are those who have learned methodically to manage their laziness. Febrile, paroxysmical activity soon becomes fatigue and disillusionment; the machine breaks down before having been able to refine the product."

Charlas de café allows us to penetrate deeper still in Ramón y Cajal's mind than Recuerdos de mi vida. And one sees a great man indeed, great because he understands fully the futility of effort, and yet carries on.