OBSERVATIONS BY HASSELBALCH. 27 



intermediate metabolism products. Meals, which as a rule follow so 

 quickly after each other that the fat and albumin absorption in the 

 course of a day does not cease at all, can therefore not have any recog- 

 nizable influence on the quotient. The evident conclusion is that if 

 a meal (having constant composition) causes variations in the quotient 

 of the above-mentioned character, it must mean that the nourishment 

 is insufficient. I am not certain whether experiments favor this con- 

 clusion, but I do not doubt that the supposition is true in the case of 

 the adult. 



The meal affects the amount of the metabolism in such a way that 

 the activity of the muscles and of the glands, caused by the ingestion of 

 the food, increases the respiratory metabolism about 10 per cent. 

 If we consider table 4, in which the experiments are arranged according 

 to the time which has elapsed after the last meal, there seems to be 

 little doubt concerning the effect of the meal on the respiratory quo- 

 tient. In the two experiments (25 and 22) which began an hour after 

 the meal, the middle of the experiment corresponding to 1^ hours after 

 the meal (intervals which are important in carbohydrate metabolism) , 

 high quotients are found, namely, 0.930 and 0.916. These quotients 

 point towards a predominant carbohydrate metabolism. In experi- 

 ment 21 the meal was given 2 hours previous and the quotient is 0.799. 

 Almost the same quotient was found in experiment 24 (0.807). Pre- 

 vious to this experiment the child had not been fed for 2 hours, but was 

 put to the breast just before the experiment began. The preceding 

 meal may, therefore, be considered as having increased the metabolism 

 but not as having changed the quotient, because at the end of the exper- 

 iment only 38 minutes had elapsed since the meal (15 plus 23 minutes). 

 The metabolism during the experiment was the metabolism of the ele- 

 ments from the previous meal. The exact correspondence between 

 the quotients in these two experiments also seems to indicate that 

 the metabolism of the food given just before experiment 24 did not 

 begin during the experimental period. 



Experiments 15 and 16, with a 5-day-old incubator child for subject, 

 are interesting because they point towards the time when the metabo- 

 lism of a meal begins; they were conducted at 1-hour intervals. The 

 child received its last meal 2 hours before experiment 15, and therefore 

 in this experiment has a quotient of 0.770 (approximately the same as 

 the quotient in 21 and 24). With experiment 16, however, the child 

 had its last meal an hour previous to the beginning of the experimental 

 period; we therefore find an increased quotient, i. e., 0.806. 



In experiments 28 and 30, both with infants fed at the breast 3 hours 

 previous to and again just before the experiment, quotients of 0.849 

 and 0.872 were obtained, which again show fair uniformity. These 

 quotients are considerably lower than those obtained one-half hour 

 after the meal, but higher than those obtained 2 to 2^ hours after. 

 This may be only accidental, but it is impossible to decide concerning 

 this point. If we determine the metabolism 5 hours after the meal, 

 as in experiment 23, the quotient is found to be 0.691, indicating the 

 katabolism of fat. 



