ACTIVATION OF STARFISH EGGS BY BUTYRIC ACID. 



149 



tiation of development in unfertilized eggs through a slight 

 change in the physical state of the surface-film offers perhaps the 

 clearest illustration of this principle. The general conditions of 

 cytolysis have thus an intimate bearing upon the question of the 

 nature of the initial process in activation. 



Arrhenius and Madsen have studied by exact methods the 

 conditions of haemolysis in weak solutions of acids and bases. 1 

 Their experiments with ammonia offer perhaps the closest analo- 

 gies to the above experiments with starfish eggs. The rate of 

 haemolysis has been found to be directly proportional to the 

 concentration of ammonia, and to increase at a rapid rate with 

 rise of temperature. They conclude that the hsemolytic effect 

 depends upon a chemical reaction of the monomolecular class. 

 Evidently this reaction must proceed to a certain stage before 

 the corpuscles are sufficiently altered to release their haemoglobin. 

 The times required to produce at constant temperature (o) a 

 definite degree of haemolysis by different concentrations of am- 

 monia are given in the following table. 2 



TABLE VII. 



The numbers in the vertical columns show that the rate of 

 hsemolytic action is directly proportional to the concentration 

 of ammonia (qt == const.). In the horizontal columns the re- 

 lations between time of action and degree of haemolysis are 

 shown for each concentration of ammonia; these relations are 

 also similar to those between time of exposure and degree of 

 activation in starfish eggs; for example, in the experiment of 

 June 10 at 14 (Table I) the proportion of fully activated eggs 

 with exposures of 14, 16, 18, and 20 minutes were respectively 



1 Cf. Arrhenius, " Immunochemistry," Macmillans, 1907, Chapter 4; also "Quan- 

 titative Laws in Biological Chemistry," London, Bell and Co., 1915. 



2 "Immunochemistry," p. 101; "Quantitative Laws," p. 64. 



