April 7, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



359 



iodide in preventing goiter in sheep and in 

 preventing the hairless pig malady is quite 

 well known. The use of iodide in the treat- 

 ment of goiter was first brought out by the 

 work of Dumas, who was born in 1800 and 

 studied pharmacy in Geneva. Dumas and 

 Coindet found that iodine was valuable in the 

 treatment of goiter. The use of sodium iodide 

 in the prevention and cure of goiter was 

 strikingly emphasized in 1917 by Marine and 

 Kimball.* This leads to the natural conclusion 

 that the cause of goiter, or at least one of the 

 causes, might be the lack of iodine in our diet. 

 Iodine seems to be very rare in food and soils 

 (Private communication of Oswald Schreiner) 

 or else the former methods of detection have 

 not been sufficient for such traces as do exist 

 (See Kendall and Richardson^ for later meth- 

 ods). Iodine has been found in a number of 

 rocks such as slates (Gentile"), limestones 

 (Lemberf), dolomite (Rivier and Fellenberg*) 

 and granites (Gautier) in Europe and has 

 been reported in vapor from Vesuvius (Mat- 

 teucci''), but it seems to be leached out so rap- 

 idly from soils it is seldom to be detected. 

 Forbes^" failed to find iodine in about half of 

 the specimens of foods, and Cameron^'^ had a 

 similar experience. The question of the rela- 

 tion of goiter to locality has caused much dis- 

 cussion and most persons have come to the 

 conclusion that goiter is due to the presence 

 of some substance rather than the absence, but 

 since much fruitless work has been done in 

 the attempt to find this substance it would be 

 well to investigate more thoroughly the ques- 

 tion of the absence of some substance. 



■« Marine, D., and Kimball, O. P., Jour, of Lab. 

 and Clinical Med., 1917, iii: 40. 



s Kendall, E. C, and Richardson, F. S., Journal 

 of Biological Chemistry, 1921, xliii: 161. 



9 Gentile, 1849, Jahresber. d. Chemie, 251. 

 'Lambert, 1851, Jahresber. d. Chemie, 319; Jl. 



Pharm. (3), xiv, 240. 



8 Eivier and Fellenberg, 1853, Jahresber. d. 

 Chemie, 924. 



3 Matteucci, 1899, Comptes Bendus, exxix, 65. 



10 Forbes, E. B., Btill. Ohio Agri. Station, No. 

 299, page 487. 



11 Cameron, A. T., Journal of Biological Chem- 

 istry, xviii: 335. 



Goiter occurs largely in mountainous regions 

 or regions far from the sea. Iodine is so rap- 

 idly leached out of the soil that the supply of 

 it may depend upon salt spray blown from the 

 sea. During storms the waves are broken into 

 a spray and the water evaporated and the salt 

 carried for long distances through the air. This 

 salt is washed down out of the air by rains 

 and contaminates the rain water. In the 

 accompanjdng figure 1 taken from Emmons"^- 



Fig. 1 



is shown a map of the eastern states, indicating 

 the relative amount of sea salt in the rain 

 water. Determinations were made by the 

 weight of a certain constituent (the chlorine 

 ion) by the ordinary silver nitrate titration, 

 but sea water is of very uniform composition 

 in regard to everything except H„0. That is 

 to say, when the salts are diluted or concen- 

 trated, they are all changed in the same ratio, 

 and the dry salt would be of uniform com- 

 position, so that the chlorine titration would 

 indicate the relative amount of iodine. Evap- 

 orated sea water contains 50 parts per million 

 of iodine, whereas the chlorine forms 55 per 

 cent, of the evaporated sea water. The line? 

 on the map indicate parts per million of 

 chlorine in the rain water and the iodine would 

 l)e about one ten-thousandth of this amount, 

 or, in other words, a part per million of chlo- 

 rine would be about a part per ten billion of 

 iodine. We can say, therefore, that the 

 amount of iodine in the rain water rapidly 

 decreases as we go from the coast, and is least 



1= Emmons, W. H., 1913, V. S. Geol. Survey 

 Bull, 529. 



