80 THE VITAMINS 



when there is little or none in the diet and when there is considerable 

 tissue wasting. "The question immediately arises whether what is per- 

 haps the most characteristic symptom of the deficiency (the loss of the 

 desire to partake of the deficient food), is to be looked upon merely 

 as a morbid phenomenon or as an attempt of the organism to liberate 

 by starvation and subsequent tissue wasting the body stores of the lack- 

 ing vitamin, bound in the tissues so as to be inaccessible to the animal 

 under normal conditions, and thus make available a substance essential 

 for life. The occurrence of spontaneous cures on diets such as we 

 employed suggests that there may be a liberation following a con- 

 vulsive seizure which gives temporary relief and sometimes leads to a 

 transient return of appetite. Further investigation must follow before 

 an opinion on this question can be formed. It seems evident that almost 

 all the pathological changes observed in beriberi pigeons are directly 

 attributable to inanition. There are, however, certain differences be- 

 tween a vitamin B-deficient pigeon and one partially starving but re- 

 ceiving a liberal supply of the vitamin, namely, the occurrence in the 

 former of two well-defined symptoms which in the order of their 

 appearance are: (1) a diminished desire to partake of the deficient 

 food, (2) symptoms known as opisthotonos, emprosthotonos, convul- 

 sive seizures, 'cart-wheel' turning. Leg weakness is also frequently 

 present, but is not characteristic as a symptom. It yields only with 

 difficulty to vitamin B treatment and is often observed in the premortal 

 stage in control birds." 



Reader and Drummond (1926) reviewed the various claims which 

 have been made as to the quantitative relationship between vitamin B 

 and carbohydrate metabolism as previously noted, protein (Hartwell, 

 1924a, 1925c), protein and carbohydrate (Tscherkes, 1926), and total 

 food or energy metabolism (Osborne and Mendel, 1922b, 1925; and 

 Cowgill et al., 1925, 1926) and reported grow1:h data on rats fed diets 

 containing varying ratios of protein to vitamin B (yeast). In their 

 experiments, satisfactory growth was secured only when the ratio of 

 protein to the yeast extract used had a value of 5 or under. This was 

 thought to confirm the views of Hartwell and of Tscherkes that 

 vitamin B is related quantitatively to the amount of protein in the diet 

 and not to lend support to the opinion that it is related to carbohydrate 

 or total energy metabolism, at least as far as growth is concerned. 

 In the course of an attempt to throw further light on the actual rela- 

 tionship between protein and vitamin B, Hassan and Drummond 

 (1927) discovered that it is apparently not vitamin B which is con- 

 cerned in the supplementary effect of yeast in the high protein diets 



