1888-89.] Mr Irvine & Dr Woodhead on Carbonate of Lime. 347 
tissue areas with increased tissue activity in the immediate 
neighbourhood. Numerous other examples might be cited, but 
these will suffice for our present purpose. 
Fokker* maintained that he had been successful for the first 
time in preparing albuminate of lime as a translucent gelatinous 
mass which “ is soluble in water in solution of sodium chloride and 
in phosphoric acid. Its aqueous solutions are not coagulated by 
boiling except after the addition of neutral salts. They are pre- 
cipitated by acids, the precipitate being soluble in excess.” He 
gives a series of experiments to prove that lime albuminate is 
present in the blood, and that it there behaves just as do artifically 
prepared solutions of lime albuminate, i.e ., “it can be preserved for 
some time in vacuo without depositing calcium phosphate, but this 
is gradually thrown down by caustic alkalies and precipitated by 
ammonium oxalate,” and he concludes that it is probable that all 
the lime in the serum is present as lime albuminate, and that no 
other lime compounds exist in the blood. 
It is certainly quite possible that this may be the case, but not 
very probable, though the albumen may be the medium in which 
many of the changes are brought about in the rearrangement of the 
salts of the alkalies and alkaline earths in the various chemico- 
physiological processes. On the other hand, phosphate of lime is 
found in all animal tissues, in the blood, in urine, serous fluids, 
saliva, and in gastric juice; it is soluble in chlorides of sodium and 
ammonium, in combination with protein compounds, lactic acid or 
sugar, and we know that it may be present in solutions made up 
experimentally. From the fact that protein compounds keep the 
phosphate of lime in solution, and from what has been observed 
in the oviduct of the hen, and in the mantle of Anodonta, &c., it is 
possible, as Fokkerf suggests, that the lime may be held in the 
blood, and perhaps also in the lymph, in part as a lime phosphate 
albuminate, from which the carbonate is formed by the accession 
at any point, but especially on a free surface, of a large quantity of 
carbonic acid, the phosphoric acid being again absorbed and reutilised. 
Without doubt the phosphoric acid and lime appear to be 
associated with the albumen present in the blood, and although we 
* Pfliiger’s Archiv, vol. vii. p. 274 ; see Watts’s Dictionary of Chemistry. 
t Loc. cit. 
