396 CHAMBERLAIN AND VEDDER. 



gallinarum are apparentlj' the same. If a fowl is starved completely 

 it is certainly deprived of the neuritis-preventing substance present in 

 food. In such an experiment, therefore, it simply depends upon indi-. 

 vidual idiosyncrasy vphether the fowl will die of starvation before neuritis 

 can develop or vice versa. In other words it is a question whether the 

 bird will die of general starvation or develop neuritis as a result of the 

 absence of certain food elements necessary to nerve nutrition, a pheno- 

 menon which we will term partial starvation. In the great majority 

 of cases the fowl will die without nerve degeneration as we should 

 expect, but there will be a few exceptions to this rule for the following 

 reason. Cocks fed on a diet of polished rice contract neuritis in an 

 average of thirty days. In some instances a much longer time is required, 

 while on the other hand many birds develop neuritis in less than thirty 

 days. Several fowls in our experiments have contracted neuritis in 

 nineteen days. Cocks that have been given nothing but water have 

 lived from fourteen to twenty-three days. Therefore, it is apparent 

 that in a few cases it may be possible for the nerve degeneration resulting 

 from partial starvation to occur before the fowl succimibs to general 

 starvation. 



So far as we know, nothing at all resembling beriberi has ever de- 

 veloped in a professional faster or among men who have undergone 

 starvation. But it has been shown by Frazer and Stanton (3) that it 

 is necessary for men to subsist at least eighty-seven days on a diet of 

 polished rice before cases of beriberi begin to appear, and it is extremely 

 improbable that any man could live eighty-seven days without food. In 

 the case of the fowl, therefore, the incubation period of polyneuritis is 

 such that in a few instances it may fall within the time the bird can 

 resist starvation, a condition that is impossible in the case of man. The 

 observation that certain fowls when starved will develop neuritis is, 

 therefore, no argument against the similarity of beriberi and polyneuritis 

 gallinarum, since there is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for the 

 presence of this phenomenon in fowls and its absence in man. 



In our previous communication refeiTed to above we showed that the 

 neuritis of fowls could be prevented by means of an extract of rice polish- 

 ings containing the following: 



Per cent. 

 Total solids 1.34 



Ash 0.03 



Phosphorous pentoxide 0.00165 



Nitrogen 0.0406 



Sucrose 0.88 



We further showed -that the neuritis-preventing substance must be 

 soluble in cold alcohol and in cold water, and must be dialyzable. How- 

 ever, we stated that these results were based on a comparatively small 



