238 W. J. M. SCOTT 



gators against him and his work and they speedily lost sight of 

 his very valuable objective findings. Soon his researches lost 

 all their novelty and were forgotten together with the patho- 

 logical studies based on them. 



Very recently interest has been revived in these granules of 

 Altmann, now called mitochondria, but unfortunately we are 

 rather inclined to regard their study as something new and novel. 

 We are altogether too apt to think that anything relating to them 

 in pathology is new. On the other hand, there is a danger in 

 accepting Altmann's work unreservedly because the technique 

 which he used was far from specific and brought to light many 

 granules which are certainly not mitochondria. So that we 

 have to deal with two mitochondrial literatures in pathology, 

 separated by a gap of twenty years or more, the first was stimu- 

 lated by Altmann", and the second is to be regarded as one of the 

 manifestations of the recent revival of interest in protoplasm, as 

 contrasted with the nucleus. 



So far as I have been able to ascertain there are no observa- 

 tions on mitochondrial changes in phosphorus poisoning in the 

 older literature but several contributions of importance have 

 been made in the last few years. The first of these is a paper by 

 Ciaccio ('13, p. 725) who has made use of phosphorus, along with 

 other poisons, to bring about experimental changes in mito- 

 chondria. His one brief reference to the pancreas is the only 

 observation which I have been able to find concerning mitochon- 

 drial changes in that tissue as the result of phosphorus poisoning. 

 He has tw^o figures illustrating the phenomena which he observed. 

 They show simply a diffuse knotty swelling of the mitochondria 

 to which he apphes the term Traeplastorhexis.' Indeed he does 

 not mention these changes in the pancreas in the text at all, 

 apart from the general discussion of the changes in other org^ans. 



We owe by far the most detailed information regarding the 

 mitochondrial changes in phosphorus poisoning, as well as in a 

 large variety of other intoxications, to Mayer, Rathery and 

 Schaeffer ('14, p. 607) who worked on the liver. They found 

 that the mitochondria respond by a change ih their form and 

 staining reactions. On the basis of their observations they divide 



