368 



NATURE 



[August i8, 1898 



In the spring of 1885, at Divonne-les- Bains, I killed a snake, 

 and on cutting it open I found one frog slightly decomposed and 

 another frog apparently dead ; the latter recovered in about a 

 quarter of an hour, and hopped away. H, Ling Roth. 



32 Prescot Street, Halifax, August 12. 



Dogmatism on the Moon and the Weather. 



In a recent little book, " The Story of the Weather," by G. 

 F. Chambers, I have come across one of those ex cathedrd 

 statements which, I think, illustrate the curious disposition of 

 the mind (even the scientific mind) to circumscribe and limit 

 truth. " No one in his senses," our Meteorological Office is 

 quoted as saying, " can believe in the moon's influence on the 

 weather." Is the matter, then, clear as noonday, or as an 

 axiom of mathematics ? Supposing we have, thus far, no proof 

 of such influence, how can we possibly be certain that no such 

 influence exists," or will ever be demonstrated ? I happen to be, 

 unfortunately, one of those " lunatics"; but I rather think I am 

 in good company. The author of the book himself, oddly enough, 

 just before approving, apparently, the above dictum, expresses 

 his firm conviction (p. 197) that the full moon scatters clouds ! 

 (a point, however, which I cannot say I have studied). 



A. B. M. 



Rules for Compositors and Readers. 



In the British Printer for May and June of last year appears 

 an article under the above heading, by Mr. Horace Hart, 

 Controller, Clarendon Press, Oxford, which, as in my case, 

 may have escaped the notice of some of your readers. 

 On this assumption it would be as well, taking into consider- 

 ation the importance of the matter to scientific men generally 

 and directors of museums in particular, to ask for the views 

 of others qualified to judge upon the advisability of dis- 

 carding the use of the digraphs oe and ae in Greek words 

 written in English characters, in Latin words, and — presumably 

 — in words derived therefrom, such as Coelenterata and 

 Caesarean, which, according to Mr. Hart, should not be 

 written, as they usually are, Coelenterata and Ctesarean. The 

 importance of such a ruling cannot be over-estimated in any 

 museum which desires to teach and not mislead its students — to 

 say nothing of the waste of elaborate labels which the disuse of 

 the digraphs entails, and these considerations must be my 

 excuse for troubling your technical readers for their opinions. 



Leicester. Montagu Browne. 



''ARTIFICIAL food:' 

 T j NDER the above title the Daily Chronicle of Friday, 

 ^ August 5, prints a telegram from its Vienna corre- 

 spondent announcing the synthetic preparation, by Dr. 

 Leon Lilienfeld, of albumen having " absolutely the same 

 nourishing qualities as found in that which is obtained 

 from organic beings." Such a synthesis would undoubt- 

 edly mark an epoch both in chemistry and physiology, 

 but unfortunately for those who have attached undue 

 importance to Dr. Lilienfeld's announcement, the data 

 given in the sensational telegrams, if correct, were 

 sufficient to show that, whatever he might have achieved 

 he had certainly not obtained the substance commonly 

 known as albumen. It is enough to point out that with 

 the materials employed, the artificial product could not 

 contain sulphur, which, at any rate up to the present, is 

 regarded as an essential constituent of albumen. 



The report of the International Congress of Applied 

 Chemistry, given in the number of the Chemiker Zeitung 

 (xxii. 644) just to hand, includes a short account of Dr. 

 Lilienfeld's paper. Translated it runs : — 



" Dr. Lilienfeld gave a very interesting account of the 

 artificial synthesis of albuminous substances {Eizveiss- 

 kbrper). It has been found possible to prepare pepton 

 hydrochloride by the condensation of phenol and glycocoll 

 with phosphoric oxychloride ; thus obtained, it gives all 

 the reactions of the albuminoids. The lecturer experi- 

 mentally demonstrated the preparation and properties of 

 the new compound. By previous conversion into the 

 NO 1503, VOL. 58] 



sulphate and decomposition of the latter, the free pepton 

 can be obtained, and resembles, both in its chemical 

 and physiological behaviour, the natural pepton from 

 albumen. The analytical data corresponded with those 

 given by natural pepton." 



From this it is evident that Dr. Lilienfeld claims not 

 the synthesis of albumen, but that of pepton, a digestion 

 product of albumen, which, in spite of the statements of 

 Henninger and others, does not seem so far to have 

 been reconverted to its parent substance. In the absence 

 of exact details, it is impossible to say how far the claim 

 to the synthesis of pepton is justified, but it may be as 

 well to recall previous work in the same direction. 



Grimaux published in the Comptes rendus, about 

 fourteen years ago, several papers on the formation of 

 colloids from inorganic materials. .Among others he 

 obtained two: (i) by heating meta-amidobenzoic acid 

 with phosphorus pentachloride, and (2) by the action of 

 ammonia on solid aspartic anhydride heated at 170°. 

 Although it was not to be expected that albumen would 

 be obtained from such materials, it is remarkable how 

 close was the resemblance between these colloids and 

 the proteids when judged solely by their reactions. 



A little later Schiitzenberger attempted the synthesis 

 of proteids from the products of their decomposition. He 

 had been engaged for some years on the study of the 

 products of the hydrolytic decomposition of albumen by 

 barium hydrate solution at varying temperatures. Among 

 the substances obtained were various amido-acids of 

 both the fatty and the aromatic series. He therefore 

 dehydrated a mixture of these acids and urea with 

 phosphoric anhydride, hoping thus to reverse the hydra- 

 tion process. Without giving details of the method 

 employed, it is sufficient to say that he obtained a colloid 

 which gave the reactions usually considered diagnostic 

 of a proteid. 



In 1897 Dr. J. W. Pickering (in continuation of a series 

 of papers published in conjunction with Prof Halliburton 

 in the Journal of Physiology) contributed an interesting 

 paper to the Royal Society's Proceedings (Nature, 

 1897, 341), in which, besides confirming Grimaux's results, 

 he added many valuable observations of his own. 

 Among the most remarkable of these is the fact that the 

 colloid obtained from aspartic anhydride is digested by 

 pepsin-hydrochloric acid, and then gives the colour re- 

 actions for pepton, and, further, that it closely resembles 

 the nucleo-proteids in its physiological action. 



Dr. Pickering, moreover, greatly extended Grimaux's 

 work, and prepared several new colloids, such as one 

 from a mixture of tyrosine, biuret, and phosphorus penta- 

 chloride, a second from para-amidobenzoic acid and 

 phosphorus pentachloride, and a third from alloxan, 

 meta-amidobenzoic acid and phosphoric anhydride. 

 These, together with several others, gave the reactions 

 of the proteids, coagulated at definite temperatures, and 

 produced intravascular coagulation of the blood. Still 

 more noteworthy is the fact that according to the author 

 they are optically active, like the natural proteids. 

 Should this statement be confirmed, these would be the 

 first optically active substances produced directly from 

 inactive materials. As this feat has hitherto been 

 regarded by chemists as improbable, if not impossible, 

 these colloids are certainly worthy of closer investigation 

 from this point of view. 



Dr. Lilienfeld, too, has synthesised a substance giving 

 the reactions of a proteid by condensation of a base 

 which he called biuretdimethylene, with different amido- 

 acids. It should, however, be noted that these workers, 

 so far, have not claimed that the products obtained 

 were actually proteids, but only that they bore a striking 

 resemblance to them ; and in this they were doubtless 

 correct. 



It is well known that the so-called " tests " applied to 

 the detection of a proteid are purely empirical. Such 



