110 A GRAIN OF BARLEY. 
a different standpoint from that usually taken. In analyses of 
the barley grain, and of the malt resulting from it, it has 
been customary for chemists to treat the grain as a whole, and 
to estimate the various constituents, and their products of 
transformation, regardless of their distribution in the grain. 
In my opinion no true progress can be made in this. way. 
It is almost as reasonable to hope that serious advances can 
be made in animal chemistry by taking the entire body of an 
animal, estimating the various chemical substances it contains 
at different periods, and then expecting to explain the complex 
physiological processes involved in its life and growth. 
The time has come when we must cease to treat the ger- 
minating grain in this crude way, but must previously dissect 
out its various portions and determine the distribution of their 
constituents, and the changes they undergo. This is a matter 
requiring, it is true, time and great patience, but it is, I am 
sure, the only rational course to take, 
These problems have been dealt with hitherto by purely 
analytical and micro-chemical processes, but I must now 
bring to your notice a new method which is capable of deal- 
ing with them synthetically. 
From the time when I first fully grasped the important 
fact that the germ or embryo of the seed does not form part: 
of the endosperm but is parasitic upon it, I have always 
looked upon it as possible that the embryo might be severed 
from its natural host and brought up with an artificial endo- 
sperm. It is comparatively easy to carry this idea out 
experimentally, and I find that when barley embryos are care- 
fully dissected out of the grain they can be put out to “ wet 
nurse,” as it were, and successfully reared through their plant 
childhood by the aid of an artificial foster-mother, consisting of 
solutions of perfectly definite and known composition. You 
have before you on the table the results of some of these 
experiments, the excised embryos of barley having been placed 
upon thin porous tiles which are partially immersed in various 
nutritive solutions. The solutions employed in these particular 
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