Whenever the word "adventures" appears in a title, the prospective reader fully relies on the author to produce engaging material. This book fulfils its title. It is replete with physiologic history, reminiscence and pertness combined with authoritative presentation of scientific investigations on respiration, asphyxiation and resuscitation. This is a book with flavor—Hendersonian flavor. Two synthetic quotations reflect the historical and reminiscent aspects of the book:
On the morning of May 9, 1794, in the Palace de la Revolution in Paris, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier died under the guillotine. The Republic, it was said, had no need of scientists. As the sharp stroke of the guillotine severed his neck, there passed away from this world in his fifty-first year this master mind of science, who had done so much to draw aside from truth the veil of man's ignorance and wrong thought.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, every young