1922 FIRST EDITION BIOLOGY OF DEATH BY RAYMOND PEARL, JOHNS HOPKINS PIONEER IN THE STUDY OF AGING. 8 inches tall, 275 pages, original red cloth binding, many figures, graphs, tables, and photographic plates. Light wear to corners and ends of spine, bookplate of previous owner on front paste-down, signature on front free endpaper, very good. In custom archival mylar cover. EDITOR'S ANNOUNCEMENT. 'Biology, which not long ago was purely descriptive and speculative, lias begun to adopt the methods of the exact sciences, recognizing that for permanent progress not only experiments are required but that the experiments should be of a quantitative character. It will be the purpose of this series of monographs to emphasize and further as much as possible this development of Biology. Experimental Biology and General Physiology are one and the same science, by method as well as by contents, since both aim at explaining life from the physico-chemical constitution of living matter. The series of monographs on Experimental Biology will therefore include the field of traditional General Physiology. Jacques Loeb, T. H. Morgan, W. J. V. Osterhout.' CONTENTS: The Problem; Conditions of Cellular Immortality ; The Chances of Death; The Causes of Death; Embryology and Human Mortality; The Inheritance of Duration of Life in Man; Experimental Studies on the Duration of Life; Natural Death, Public Health, and the Population Problem. GARRISON-MORTON No. 137. RAYMOND PEARL (1879- 1940) was an American biologist, regarded as one of the founders of biogerontology. He spent most of his career at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1908 Max Rubner observed that mammals of different size and longevity had equal mass specific metabolic output. Partly based on the observation that the longevity of fruit flies varies inversely with ambient temperature, Pearl (like Rubner) also asserted that maximum life span is inversely proportional to basal metabolic rate. Pearl accepted Alexis Carrel's erroneous ideas that normal somatic cells don't age, and that aging must therefore be due to dysfunction at the body level. Pearl speculated that lifespan was limited by vital cell components that were depleted or damaged more rapidly in animals with faster metabolisms. Denham Harman's free-radical theory of aging later provided a plausible causal mechanism for Pearl's hypothesis. The Rate of Living Hypothesis enjoyed prominence as one of the foremost theories of aging for nearly 50 years. More recently, further doubts have been raised on the Rate of Living Hypothesis by the demonstration that, when modern statistical methods for correcting for the effects of body size and phylogeny are employed, metabolic rate does not correlate with longevity in mammals or birds.