156 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVni. No. 970 



Besides its use in Mr. Bryee's book, I find 

 " selvas " mentioned in E. W. Heaton's " Sci- 

 entific Geography; South America," London 

 (1912), at pages 17, 39 and 55. Elsewhere in 

 that book the author seems to get along quite 

 comfortably without the word. 



8elva is a Portuguese word like any other, 

 but it is very little used and has no special 

 application to the forests of the Amazon. The 

 Brazilians do not distinguish the forests of 

 the Amazon by any special word; they are 

 called mattas, which is the word applied to 

 any and all heavy forests alike. 



J. C. Branner 

 Eio DE Janeiro, Bkazil, 

 June 6, 1913 



DOES A LOW-PROTEIN DIET PRODUCE RACIAL IN- 

 FERIORITY ? 



To THE Editor op Science : In your issue of 

 June 13, 1913, is contained a communication 

 by Dr. Edgar T. Wherry entitled : " Does a 

 Low-protein Diet Produce Eacial Inferior- 

 ity 1 " The purpose of the article is to dispose 

 of two objections that have been raised against 

 such a dietary, by the application of the re- 

 sults of recent investigations. It seems to me 

 that, in attempting the removal of the first ob- 

 jection, the article is open to some misconcep- 

 tion, while, in the case of the second objection, 

 the attempted disposal is far from being effec- 

 tive. 



Dr. Wherry is presumably dealing with in- 

 stances of recognized racial inferiority, and 

 the inclusion of the Japanese people in this 

 category, especially by an advocate of the low- 

 protein theory, is a matter of some surprise. 

 That the Japanese exhibit " some points of 

 physical inferiority, or lack energy, aggres- 

 siveness, or courage," when compared with the 

 European, for instance, on a protein-rich 

 dietary, is hardly a generally recognized fact, 

 nor is it in harmony with the contentions of 

 Chittenden and others of his belief that in the 

 Japanese we have an instance of a people 

 " who for generations have apparently lived 

 and thrived on a daily ration noticeably low 

 in its content of proteid. . . ." Chittenden 



utilizes this fact " as confirmatory evidence, 

 on a large scale, of the perfect safety of low- 

 ering the consumption of proteid food to some- 

 where near the level of the physiological re- 

 quirements of the body," and believes that 

 " generations of low-proteid feeding, with the 

 temperance and simplicity in dietary methods 

 thereby implied, have certainly not stood in 

 the way of phenomenal development and ad- 

 vancement when the gateway was opened for 

 the ingress of modern ideas from western civ- 

 ilization." ' 



The conceptions regarding the etiology of 

 beri-beri have not undergone any radical 

 change in the last year or two. The informa- 

 tion that has been accumulated recently in re- 

 gard to this disease has served to confirm and 

 extend such conceptions, not to revolutionize 

 them. Por years it has been definitely known 

 that the use of polished or husked rice is di- 

 rectly or indirectly involved in the causation 

 of beri-beri. In proof of this statement I only 

 need quote the extensive investigations of 

 Fletcher" and of Fraser and Stanton,^ pub- 

 lished six and four years ago, the results of 

 which, obtained from large numbers of indi- 

 viduals, point unequivocally to an intimate re- 

 lation between the consumption of polished 

 rice and incidence to beri-beri. The compara- 

 tively recent discovery by several investiga- 

 tors of a constituent in rice-bran which cures 

 the polyneuritis of beri-beri simply confirms 

 the previous work above mentioned. Further- 

 more, this discovery does not at all militate 

 against the contention that has often been 

 raised that a diet containing a liberal and 

 varied protein value is an eft'ective preventive 

 against beri-beri. 



I doubt whether Dr. Wherry would find 

 many dietitians, on either side of the argu- 

 ment, who consider the relation between the 

 protein intake and the incidence to beri-beri 

 one of the " supposedly most typical iUustra- 



'" Nutrition of Man," pp. 222-223. 



^ William Fletcher, ' ' Eice and Beri-Beri, ' ' 

 Lancet, June 29, 1907. 



° H. Fraser and A. T. Stanton, ' ' An Enquiry 

 Concerning the Etiology of Beri-Beri," Lancet, 

 February 13, 1909. 



