β Scribed by C.J.W. Brooks
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Chromatography has played manifold roles in the modern study of steroids. Alumina adsorption chromatography, the classic technique of the 194Os, was complemented (especially for hormonal steroids) by paper chromatography in the 1950s. The ascendancy of the latter technique ended -by an unlucky coincidence-at about the time of appearance of I.E. Bush's apostolic monograph "The chromatography of steroids" in 1961. Thereafter, thin-layer and gas-liquid chromatography gained dominant importance, and have been followed by other developments such as highpressure liquid chromatography. Dr. Erich Heftmann is well known for several previous books, including an invaluable general text on "Chromatography". He has now produced a practical handbook on the chromatography of steroids, designed to bridge the long interval since the publication of the 2nd edition of R. Neher's "Steroid chromatography" in 1364. The timely new work contains 16 chapters amounting to 123 printed pages: a further 6S pages are devoted to 1192 references, conveniently arranged in alphabetical order of authors and cited in full, with titles. in addition, there is a list of commercial products, and an index, mainly of steroids. The fist few chapters briefly review the techniques of liquid column chromatography, paper chromatography, thin-layer chromatography and gas chromatography, together with the relationships between structure and chromatographic mobility. The various classes of steroids are dealt with in the remaining chapters: many practical details are given, often with critical evaluations. -More than one-third of the space is occupied by tables of chromatographic data. Some of these are reproduced directly from original papers, but others contain data concentrated from many sources. A very large amount of useful information has been condensed into this relatively slim volume. In some instances, conciseness has led to imprecision, e.g., on p. lQ, "Heavily loaded columns have other virtues, such as high load capacity" and on p. 46, "Since the relative retention time, r, is the ratio of the retention times of two substances, log I is the difference between them". More serious is the doubtless inadvertent implication (p. 51) that values of dR31~ and k (group retention factors) are altered by small changes in gas fIow-rate or in the amount of liquid phase: they are not. The list of commercial products is necessarily arbitrary, but its attribution of a particular chemical structure to the name Chromosorb (registered trade mark of Johns-Manville, used for a variety of products) is misleading. Exception may also be taken to the use of the symbol RF (in tables) to denote various relative mobilities. Typo_graphical errors are few, but two of chemical si_&ficance are on p. 60 ("propyl" for propionyl) and in footnotes to Table 7.2 ("deoxycholanoate" for deoxychoiate).
The book is produced to a high s'tindard, and the stout binding should with-
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