Spermine, Choline, Ergothioneine 161 



known as spermine. This was actually the letter in which Leeuwen- 

 hoek also communicated for the first time the discovery of living 

 spermatozoa and their movement in fresh semen; it was published 

 the following year in the Philosophical Transactions (Plate VII). 

 During the 200 years which followed, the same crystalline substance 

 was rediscovered by several investigators, most of whom were 

 apparently unaware of either Leeuwenhoek's original, or of the 

 others' later observations. 



Vauquelin(1791) observed in a semen sample which he left standing 

 for four days, the deposition of 'cristaux transparens, d'environ 

 une ligned de long, tres-minces, & qui se croisent souvent de maniere 

 a representer les rayons d'une roue. Ces cristaux isoles nous ont 

 offert, a Faide d'un verre grossissant, la forme d'un solide a quatre 

 pans, termines par des pyramides tres-allongees, a quatre faces.' 

 After having studied the properties and behaviour of these crystals 

 towards different solvents, Vauquelin concluded that 'la nature de 

 ces cristaux est analogue a celle du phosphate de chaux ou la bas 

 des os'. The belief that the sperm crystals consist of ordinary phos- 

 phate persisted throughout the best part of the next century. In the 

 meantime, however, the same crystalline substance was found out- 

 side the semen in other tissues and body fluids, including sputum, 

 leucaemic blood, liver, spleen and old pathological-anatomical pre- 

 parations, so that towards the close of the XlXth century spermine 

 was already known by no less than ten names of various distin- 

 guished clinicians, anatomists and physiologists, including, in 

 chronological order, Charcot, 1853; Foerster, 1859; Harting, 1859; 

 White, 1861 ('leucosine'); Friedrich, 1864; Huppert, 1864; Boettcher, 

 1865; Neumann, 1866; Eberth, 1869; Ley den, 1872; and Zenker, 

 1876. But in the end, the medical world at large restricted itself 

 largely to the use of two names, 'Charcot-Leyden crystals' with 

 reference to organs and sputum ('asthma crystals'), and 'Boettcher 

 crystals' with reference to semen. Boettcher himself preferred to 

 call the substance 'Spermatin', and regarded it as a protein; he 

 published his paper 'Farblose Krystalle eines eiweissartigen Korpers 

 aus dem menschlichen Sperma dargestellt' in 1865, without however, 

 taking the trouble to mention the previous investigators. 



The credit for having been the first to recognize spermine as the 

 phosphate of a new organic base, is due to Schreiner (1878) who 



