THE president's 



that though the containing cavity is oval, the cysticercus itself is 

 shaped like a soda-water bottle, with two or three extra lengths of 

 neck ; and the manifest moral of this tale is that when meat 

 contains oval cavities about ^ — Y^ an inch in length, filled with 

 fluid, it should be rejected as unfit for food, but will probably 

 reward careful inspection under a two-inch object-glass. Those 

 persons who swallow " pork-measles " are likely to become the 

 subjects of tape-worm. Happily the eaters of meat, when 

 thoroughly cooked, find that the germs and all lurking traces of 

 animal life are destroyed, while those who venture on meat which 

 has only known a boiling-point heat, may find these germs 

 developing after all. 



The starches which form so large a part of our daily food 

 have, as is well known, a characteristic reaction with free iodine, 

 and an equally characteristic behaviour with polarised light ; the 

 black cross in each starch grain becomes coloured when a selenite 

 is placed under the object. A slide which has been sent round 

 the Society this year shows the cells in their natural arrangement 

 in the potato ; fortunately the tuber can be easily cut into 

 the thin slices required to show them. And still more 

 recently some capital sections of wheat-grains have been circu- 

 lated. In these the purple stain used by the mounter had attached 

 itself to the living tissues of the seed, while the starch-cells 

 were unaffected. 



The largest starch-cells are those of the Carina edulis , a 

 relative of the arrowroot plant. Why does the starch grain show 

 the concentric lines with bright lights and a dark cross with the 

 Nicol prism ? The fine lines are the marks of the successive layers 

 of growth, and are, in fact, the edges of a series of minute ridges. 

 Cold water has little effect on starch, but hot water causes the 

 cells to swell. Thus the wall is ruptured, and the contents 

 escape ; this may be watched under the quarter-inch objective. 



Starch is a substance worthy of a little more extended notice, 

 seeing that we swallow it in one form or another to an amount 

 once or twice the weight of our bodies every year. How 

 much starch does an ordinary adult consume annually in the form 

 of potatoes alone ? I imagine, from the large and heaped dishes 

 which I see on the tables of artisans and labouring men, that 



