236 SECRETS OF EARTH AND SEA 



century was lemon-juice, carefully prepared from lemons 

 in Sicily and Italy, and from 1804 to i860 in Malta. 

 When the demand for it increased in the nineteenth 

 century, it was adulterated and made up from poor 

 fruit, as the commercial enterprise of contractors and 

 the fatuous incapacity of the naval authorities progressed 

 hand in hand. And then, in the early fifties, the West 

 Indian growers of the small sour-lime {Citrus medica 

 var. acida) in Montserrat got the naval contracts, the 

 honest intention of Sir William Burnett, the chief medical 

 officer of the Navy, being to establish a permanent and 

 first-rate supply. Strangely enough, the naval " lime-juice " 

 now really was lime-]u\CQ and no longer lemon-]u\CQ. By 

 a natural but fatal misconception, the medical value of 

 the juice, whether of lemon or of lime, was by all authori- 

 ties attributed to the citric acid present; and the only 

 tests applied to it were chemical ones, and not therapeutic. 

 The Lister Institute Committee have shown by therapeutic 

 experiment — the feeding of guinea-pigs, in which scurvy 

 can be produced and cured at will — that the anti- scorbutic 

 vitamine remains active and unimpaired in lemon-juice 

 from which all the citric acid has been extracted. And, 

 further, that the juice of the West Indian sour-lime 

 {Citrus medica acida), although very rich in citric acid, 

 contains only one-fourth the anti-scorbutic vitamine which 

 the same quantity of the juice of the true lemon {Citrus 

 medica limonum) contains. This has been most carefully 

 established by prolonged series of feeding experiments. 

 It explains the failure of the lime-]\i\ce. in Sir George 

 Nares' Polar Expedition, and restores the confidence in 

 lemon-juice based on the unanimous testimony of the 

 early records of its use. 



Whilst lemon-juice is thus justified, Dr. Harriette 

 Chick has made a discovery which will go far to remove 

 it from supremacy. She finds that an anti-scorbutic food 



