CHEMICAL CONSTITUENTS 287 



and free of many constituents present in the dark brown solu- 

 tion obtained when glands are extracted which have stood for 

 sometime at room temperature after the death of the animal. 

 Obviously autolysis results in the production of a number of 

 substances not present as such in the normal living organ. 



GENERAL COMPOSITION 



Even superficial examination of an adrenal gland will 

 show its exceedingly high lipid content. In an analysis by 

 Biedl, 56 the adrenals of the pig showed 74.61 per cent water 

 and 25.39 per cent dry residue. Of the latter, 61.12 per cent 

 was protein-like in nature while 38.88 per cent was of a lipoidal 

 or fatty nature. 



The water content of the adrenal glands undergoes wide 

 variations which are dependent on the lipid content of the 

 gland. The greater the lipid content, the less is the water 

 content of a given gland. Materna and Januschke 445 found 

 the water content of the human adrenal to vary from 58 per 

 cent to 85 per cent of the gross weight of the gland. This 

 represents an unusual variation not frequently encountered in 

 other organs. 



The adrenals are also characterized by an unusually high 

 sulfur content, 3.77 per cent of their dry residue being com- 

 posed of this element. Only the epidermis and its horny 

 derivatives (hair and nails) have such high sulfur contents. 

 This high sulfur content led Loeper and his coworkers and 

 Aufrecht and Dresing 135 to assume that the adrenals are in- 

 volved in the sulfur metabolism of the body, but other evidence 

 for this view is lacking. 



The nature of the sulfur compounds present in the adrenals 

 is not entirely clear. A great part of the sulfur is present as 

 glutathione which is found in higher concentration in the 

 adrenal glands than in other organs. Thus in the dog 

 Blanchetiere et alii* 2 found the adrenals to contain 4.8 mgms. 

 of glutathione per gram of adrenal tissue, while the liver and 



