STORAGE OF FOOD IN THE SEED 19 
Of what use would it have been to the plant? 
If the student wishes to perform this experiment at home for 
himself, he should bear in mind the following. 
Caution. — Never handle benzine or ether near a flame or stove. 
A much simpler experiment to find oil in seeds may readily be 
performed by the pupil at home. Put the material to be studied, 
e.g., flaxseed meal, corn meal, wheat flour, cotton-seed meal, buck- 
wheat flour, oat meal, and so on, upon little labeled pieces of white 
paper, one kind of flour or meal on each bit of paper. Place all the 
papers, with their contents, on a perfectly clean plate, free from 
cracks, or on a clean sheet of iron, and put this in an oven hot 
enough nearly (but not quite) to scorch the paper. After half an 
hour remove the plate from the oven, shake off the flour or meal 
from each paper, and note the results, a more or less distinct grease 
spot showing the presence of oil, or the absence of any stain showing 
that there was little or no oil in the seed examined. 
24. Albuminous Substances. — Albuminous substances 
or proteids occur in all seeds, though often only in small 
quantities. They have nearly the same chemical composi- 
tion as white of egg and the curd of milk among animal 
substances, and are essential to the plant, since the living 
and growing parts of all plants contain large quantities of 
proteid material. 
Sometimes the albuminous constituents of the seed 
occur in more or less regular grains (Fig. 8, AZ). But 
much of the proteid material of seeds is not in any form 
in which it can be recognized under the microscope. 
One test for its presence is the peculiar smell which it 
produces in burning. Hair, wool, feathers, leather, and 
lean meat all produce a well-known sickening smell when 
scorched or burned, and the similarity of the proteid 
material in such seeds as the bean and pea to these sub- 
stances is shown by the fact that scorching beans and 
similar seeds give off the familiar smell of burnt feathers. 
