1922] ATWOOD—FORM ALDEHYDE 255 
CATALASE 
The work of recent years has shown that there often seems to 
be a relationship between respiration of plant tissues and the 
catalase content. APPLEMAN (4, 5) has shown this relationship in 
the case of potatoes and corn, CROCKER and HARRINGTON (23) in 
the case of seeds. The latter workers find that this relationship is 
not universal, for while imbibed Johnson grass has its respiration 
paralleled by the catalase activity, this is not true for the seeds 
of Amaranthus. The most interesting observation is further made 
that in the case of Johnson grass where this parallelism is found, 
neither the respiratory activity nor the catalase content is paralleled 
by the vitality of the seeds or the seedlings. Inasmuch as seed 
vitality and seedling vigor are definitely related to formaldehyde 
treatment, and this work has linked in also the effects upon respira- 
tion, it was thought to be of interest to determine whether any 
effects of seed treatment could be noted upon the catalase activity 
of wheat. 
Catalase activity in wheat was determined much after the 
method suggested by APPLEMAN (2), and later employed with various 
modifications by other workers (17). Two series of experiments 
were conducted, one to see whether any effects of formaldehyde 
could be noted immediately after treatment while the grain was 
still moist, and another to see whether the effects of treatment 
persist on grain which has been treated and air dried before an 
electric fan in the laboratory and subsequently exposed for about a 
month to the air of the laboratory. The concentrations of formalde- 
hyde used were 1-80, 1-160, and 1-320. About 1 gm. of air dried 
wheat was used in each case, weighed on the analytical balance, and 
results computed to the basis of 1 gm. For a reaction chamber 
a bottle of 250 cc. capacity was used and shaken continuously dur- 
ing the ten minutes of the test by a mechanical shaker making 129 
excursions per minute. The reaction chamber was submerged in the 
constant temperature bath previously described, and was kept at 
28°C. Dioxygen was used and neutralized with calcium carbonate. 
It was found that 3 mg. of the chemically pure salt used would 
neutralize 5 cc. of the peroxide, and this proportion was observed 
throughout. The gas evolved was run into a too cc. gas burette, 
