134 ARTIFICIAL PARTHENOGENESIS AND FERTILIZATION 



The first vertical column of Table XVIII gives the length of 

 time that the eggs had remained in the acid, and the other 

 vertical columns give the percentage of the eggs which formed 

 membranes after this exposure to the different acids. 



TABLE XVIII 



It will be seen that the greater the number of carbon atoms 

 in the acid molecule the shorter is the time which is necessary 

 to cause membrane formation in a definite percentage of eggs. 

 This result is intelligible on the assumption that those acids 

 which diffuse most rapidly into the egg call forth membrane 

 formation in the shortest time. This behavior of the acids is 

 analogous to that of the alcohols whose narcotic and haemolytic 

 activity increases also for the same series with increase of the 

 number of carbon atoms. 1 In the alcohols, however, the in- 

 crease of activity is much quicker than that found by us for 

 the acids, for each member of the series is about two or three 

 times as effective as the preceding one. 



Although the question of the influence of the concentration 

 of the acid upon its effect is not so intimately connected with 

 our subject, one example may be noted here for the sake of 

 completeness. I quote two sets of experiments, one with 



1 Fiihner and Neubauer, "Hamolyse durch Substanzen homologer Reihen," 

 Arch. f. exper. Path. u. Pharm., LVI, 333, 1907; Overton, Studien ueber Narkose, 

 Jena, 1901. 



