ANIMAL BREEDING 195 



As regards the question of diet, the reader should 

 recall the experiments on partial inanition which have 

 been discussed in Chapter V, where it was shown that 

 as a result of malnutrition an animal is forced to call 

 upon some of its body cells for essential foodstuffs 

 omitted from its diet. In consequence, along with the 

 nitrogenous products liberated as a result of cellular 

 autolysis, it may be expected that an excessive amount 

 of cytost may find its way into the circulation, and, 

 as has been shown previously, this may result in vari- 

 ous pathologies. 



Besides containing an adequate quantity of essen- 

 tial foodstuffs, an animal's diet must be so adjusted that 

 it cannot interfere in any way with the normal proc- 

 esses of digestion and absorption, and thereby prevent 

 the proper utilization of the various dietary com- 

 ponents. Such a necessity is attested to by the results 

 of the writer's experiments with monkeys, which were 

 fed bread fried in oil, together with the other foods 

 commonly given to such animals. As stated on page 

 106, the monkeys on the high fat diet died within a 

 few months, although other monkeys kept under sim- 

 ilar conditions but not fed any of the bread fried in 

 oil continued to live an apparently normal existence. 

 In other words, although the diet was adequate from 

 a nutritional standpoint, the addition of the heated 

 oil brought about an end result similar to that induced 

 by partial inanition. Indeed, we may reasonably take 

 the view that the oil so inhibited the normal proc- 

 esses of digestion and absorption that the experimental 

 animals were in the predicament of "starving to death 

 at a banquet," and hence suffered an accumulation of 

 cytost in much the same manner as occurs on an incom- 



