84 GROWTH 



should have been carried out to complete success. Such attempts, 

 however, were not often made, and the few recorded were 

 complete failures. One of the more significant of these was really 

 an effort to solve another problem, the role of mineral salts in 

 animal nutrition. Lunin 20 used mice as experimental animals, 

 and attempted to maintain them on a diet of casein, butter, lac- 

 tose, and the ash of milk. None of his animals, however, lived 

 longer than a month on this ration, though they survived in- 

 definitely on a diet of milk itself. Lunin himself expressly 

 stated his belief that proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and salts are 

 not capable of maintaining normal nutrition, and that milk 

 must contain some other essential factor. His observations were 

 recorded in Bunge's Text Book of Physiological and Pathologi- 

 cal Chemistry , but they were not accorded the importance we 

 now know they deserved. 



It would seem desirable at this point to mention a disease that 

 has in the past received considerable publicity, beriberi. In 

 former years at least it was very prevalent in certain portions 

 of the orient, Japan, the Philippine Islands, the Dutch East 

 Indies, and other near-by regions. The symptoms are somewhat 

 varied, but peripheral neuritis seems to be the most character- 

 istic. For many years beriberi was regarded as a tropical disease, 

 limited to rice-eating populations, but it is now known that the 

 same symptoms will develop whenever the diet consists too ex- 

 clusively of any highly milled cereal. 



In 1897 a physician named Eijkman was attached as a medi- 

 cal officer to a prison in Java, where beriberi was common. 

 Poultry, maintained by the institution, were largely fed table 

 scraps, chiefly rice, and Eijkman 21 noted that they frequently 

 exhibited symptoms very similar to those of his human patients. 

 There is still some doubt that avian polyneuritis is entirely 

 analogous to human beriberi, but such an analogy has been 

 accepted by the great majority of physiologists. Beriberi was 

 then subjected to intensive study, and though some of the ob- 

 servations were conflicting, it finally became established that the 



