AGRICULTURE: HART, AND OTHERS 
377 
ture, perhaps a better protein mixture, and an abundance of growth 
promoting substances, all of which may contribute toward making it 
possible for the cell to destroy or resist the action of the toxic substance 
introduced. However, in the second gestation period on the same 
ration — wheat grain, wheat straw, alfalfa hay, the calves were weak, 
and in one case blind, but lived. This is extremely interesting as illus- 
trating the cumulative effect of this toxicity. 
Where corn stover was wholly substituted for the wheat straw we 
had a number of successes and also a number of failures in the first 
gestation period. Apparently this roughage was not as efTective as an 
'antidote' to the toxicity as the legume hay. 
We had thought it possible in our earlier work that the acidity of the 
wheat ration was an important factor in the results recorded. It was 
true that the urine of the all-wheat plant fed animals showed a slight 
acidity to litmus due to a low intake of bases in the ration. If this 
were an important factor in our results then the successful corn ration 
might be disturbed with acids and give us results similar to the wheat 
ration. This however, we found not to be the case; for when to an all 
corn ration there were added mineral acids, such as sulphuric and phos- 
phoric acids, in such proportions as to make the acidity of the urine of 
a degree similar to that of a wheat-wheat straw fed animal, the offspring 
were strong and normal in every respect. Even the addition of a high 
proportion of magnesium salts to a corn ration did not disturb in any 
way its power of producing normal offspring. 
The results detailed above indicate clearly that wheat grain contains 
a toxic material, and later work has shown that this is very prominent 
in the embryo of the seed. When wheat embryo is imposed on corn 
stover so as to bring into the ration seven to eight times the amount of 
embryo that would be introduced when feeding whole wheat, the result 
is likely to be an early abortion. The calf is now dropped at six to 
eight months; this demonstrates that the increased mass of the toxic 
material produces this disturbance at a somewhat more rapid rate. 
This result was particularly apt to occur where no other grain was used 
with the embryo. With both corn meal and corn stover in the ration 
the detrimental effect of the wheat embryo was nullified, at least for a 
single gestation period. 
It is an interesting fact that in the wheat milling industry the embryo 
passes into wheat bran in small amounts but in much greater quanti- 
ties in wheat middhngs. The wheat flour that is used for bread making 
has the least content of embryo of any of the wheat by-products. 
In an attempt to obtain an anatomical picture of the condition re- 
