1909.] ''Absorption" of Specific Agglutinins hy Bacteria, etc. 169 



considerable time before equilibrium is reached, the study of the time reaction 

 in tlie taking up of agghitinins by bacteria has been confined to the following 

 brief statements of Eiseuberg and Volk, that the velocity of reaction is 

 extremely fast and that equilibrium is reached even in five minutes at a 

 temperature of 0° C, and that no appreciable difference was to be traced in 

 the absorption velocity whether the reaction took place at 0° C. or at 37° C. 



Arrhenius, having founded his theory for the equilibria in absorption 

 processes on the experiments of Eiseuberg and Volk, uses the statement that, 

 as equilibrium is reached in less than five minutes even at 0° C, the process 

 of the taking up of agglutinin by bacteria could not be an adsorption similar 

 to the interaction between dye and fibre as proposed by Bordet, since the 

 reaction velocity is here very slow, taking a long time, even days, before 

 equilibrium is reached at room temperature. 



We made the following series of experiments to determine for ourselves if 

 the statements of Eisenherg and Volk were correct, especially as they were 

 so much in opposition to what one would a priori expect. We wished to find 

 out whether it would be possible, by comparing the velocity of absorption of 

 specific agglutinins by their own bacteria with the velocity of adsorption of 

 the same specific agglutinins and other organic and inorganic substances as, 

 e.g., trypsin or sulphuric acid by charcoal, to draw definite conclusions as to 

 the difference in the two processes in the manner done by Arrhenius to 

 support his theory that the interaction between specific agglutinin and bacteria 

 is only a special case of Guldberg and Waage's law of mass action. 



Before passing on to our own results, we must give a detailed account of 

 the technique which enabled us to reach more trustworthy results than could 

 be expected by the somewhat rough procedure of Eiseuberg and Volk. 



Technique. — For the experiments we used a brand of Bacillus coli communis 

 (called in the tables Bacillus coli Ich.) the purity of which could be relied upon 

 and which had been long subcultured in the laboratory, being the same as that 

 previously used by Dreyer and Jex-Blake. The ennilsions were made from 

 cultures grown for 24 hours in large Eoux bottles on agar surfaces inoculated 

 from a 24-hour bouillon culture which had been transplanted daily from 

 bouillon to bouillon for about a week. The surface growth was removed with 

 an aluminium scraper, great care being exercised to include neither the 

 agar itself nor the water of condensation. The mass so obtained was 

 emulsified by rubbing it with a glass rod in a glass beaker, 0'85 per cent. 

 NaCl being gradually added, until the emulsion w^as of the required density. 

 This was such that the emulsion contained 100 times as many bacilli as the 

 standard bouillon culture used for testing the agglutinin content of any given 

 .serum, and was called 100/1 N emulsion. The standardisation was effected 



P 2 



