On Mon, 28 Aug 2000 RSRICHMOND@aol.com wrote:

> Earlier in this thread Mike Titford mentioned John R. Baker's Cytological 
> Technique: Principles Underlying Routine Methods, 5th ed., Methuen 1966. - 
> Baker points out that various fixatives cause greatly different degrees of 
> shrinkage or expansion.

  The author Mike mentioned was actually Bruce Casselman, who worked in
  J.R.Baker's lab in the 1950s and wrote a book called "Histochemical
  Technique" (Methuen, 1959), which is still worth reading. Like Baker's
  Cytol. Tech. book, it was a Methuen Monograph - an excellent series
  that died out many years ago. 

  Completely by chance I met Bruce at a party in London Ont, 19 years 
  ago. He had long given up Histochemistry and taken up Public Health, 
  and had just arrived here to organize health care delivery (a
  buzz-phrase of the day) in the Far North. (I never did understand 
  why this was done in London, which is almost as far South as you can 
  get in Canada, on about the same latitude as the N. coast of Spain 
  and Portland, Oregon.) The first edition of my Methods book had been 
  published a month or two earlier, and we had a merry chat about 
  coincidences, Sudan black B and (if I remember aright) beer. Bruce
  Casselman died about 5 years ago. His widow Juanita still practises
  psychiatry in the city. 

  The first (historical) chapter of the 3rd & 4th editions of Pearse's
  Histochemistry cites Casselman's book as being small but influential,
  and I agree with that assessment. Like Baker's "Cytological Technique"
  and his larger "Principles of Biological Microtechnique" (1958; also
  Methuen, but not one of their Monographs), Casselman's book is an
  exemplary piece of concise scholarly writing. All three books exude
  their writers' enthusiasm, and induces the reader to jot down and
  follow up the references for statements that arouse interest.

 John A. Kiernan,
 Department of Anatomy & Cell Biology,
 The University of Western Ontario,
 LONDON,  Canada  N6A 5C1