176 ^^6 Philippine Journal of Science 1913 



was then stored for one year in a tin can without any cover, in 

 the ground floor of a building not specially protected from damp- 

 ness. It will thus be seen that this rice was exposed to the 

 dampness throughout an entire rainy season and was freely 

 accessible to roaches, weevils, and other insects. At the conclu- 

 sion of this period all the rice was musty, and actually moldy in 

 spots, and absolutely unfit for human consumption. 



Four fowls were now fed exclusively on this rice. All four 

 fowls remained in perfect health for a period of four months 

 when the experiment was discontinued. The fowls fed on this 

 rice did not lose their appetite as do fowls fed on polished rice, 

 but ate every grain of their ration up to the very last. It is 

 believed that this experiment imposed a far more severe test on 

 the keeping qualities of undermilled rice than will ever be re- 

 quired in the case of rice used for human consumption. Before 

 the experiment was concluded, this rice was fully a year and 

 a half old, since it must have been several months old before it 

 was obtained from the commissary. This experiment shows 

 conclusively that an undermilled rice does not lose its protective 

 power because of dampness or long storage. We might add that 

 in a former communication (3) we stated that we had confirmed 

 Shiga's experiment that undermilled rice which had been allowed 

 to ferment in the incubator still retained its protective proper- 

 ties, and that we have found that an extract of rice polishings, 

 prepared according to the method previously described and kept 

 in an ice box to prevent decomposition, (4) has retained its pro- 

 tective and curative powers for a period of at least seven months. 



Soon after describing the preparation of this extract (4) we 

 had reason to believe that all of the protective substances in the 

 polishings were not extracted by this method because of their 

 slight solubility in cold 95 per cent alcohol. Therefore, in all our 

 later work we extracted the polishings three times with succes- 

 sive portions of fresh 95 per cent alcohol, using 3 liters of alcohol 

 to each kilogram of polishings for the first extraction and 1.5 

 liters of alcohol for each of the two following extractions. The 

 extract so obtained was combined. It was found, in fact, that 

 this successive extraction with increased quantities of alcohol 

 increased the protective and curative action of the extract. 



It will be remembered that Strong and Crowell(5) used extract 

 prepared according to our method together with a polished rice 

 in feeding one group of men in their experiment, but that these 

 men were not fully protected, and some of them developed symp- 

 toms of beriberi. Since Strong and Crowell extracted each 5 



