150 THE VITAMINS 



heating to the extent required for the thorough cooking of these dry 

 legumes. Fiirst also experimented with mixtures of seeds and con- 

 cluded that "there is no advantage in numerous foods when none 

 contains the needed substance" — an observation which might well 

 become an aphorism for the guidance of menu makers. 



Fiirst found further that these seeds developed antiscorbutic prop- 

 erties when soaked and allowed to sprout. 



From this paper by Fiirst, as well as from those of Hoist and 

 Frolich, one gets the impression that these authors believed in more 

 than one antiscorbutic substance since the antiscorbutic property seemed 

 to differ in stability in different foods. Similar suggestions have since 

 been advanced by Bezssonoff (1926a, 1927a) and Randoin and Lecoq 

 (1927) but have not received very much attention. From our present 

 point of view it seems more natural to assume that these differences 

 in behavior may be due to differing conditions such as hydrogen-ion 

 activity, oxidation potential of the medium, and to colloids whose pres- 

 ence or absence would result in the vitamin being contained sometimes 

 in a heterogeneous and sometimes in a homogeneous system. Never- 

 theless we know of no evidence adequate to constitute a conclusive 

 demonstration that there is only one antiscorbutic vitamin. 



Frolich (1912) held that (under the conditions existing in Nor- 

 way) infantile scurvy was most common among children living under 

 good hygienic conditions, and that this was probably due to their being 

 fed too largely upon prepared foods and well-sterilized milk, whereas 

 children less sedulously cared for were likely to eat a greater variety 

 of foods, some of them raw, and thus were less liable to scurvy. Since 

 on the other hand the epidemics of scurvy among adults had so often 

 developed under conditions of hardship and insanitary living, there 

 had been a misleading appearance of these diseases (adult and infantile 

 scurvy) being different, whereas in reality they might be essentially 

 identical. 



Frolich showed that milk normally contains enough of the anti- 

 scorbutic substance to afford complete protection from scurvy when 

 raw milk constitutes the sole or chief food. Such heat treatments as 

 are ordinarily involved in pasteurization of milk, were found in his 

 experiments to diminish but not entirely to destroy the antiscorbutic 

 property so that whether pasteurized milk will furnish enough of the 

 antiscorbutic substance to make the diet safe will depend both upon the 

 treatment to which the milk has been subjected and upon the amount 

 of milk consumed. Pasteurized milk may prevent scurvy in the same 

 manner that raw milk does, provided the pasteurization has been prop- 



