STARVATION OF VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL TISSUES. 59 
nutritive material seemed to lie in an oily transformation in the 
protoplasm, and the ultimate reduction of the contents of the 
filaments to mere accumulations of swarming fat granules. The 
nature of these granules can generally be readily determined by 
the action of appropriate reagents, and the quantities of yellow 
oil which can be extracted is very remarkable. 
The spores of Pilobolus, as a rule, entirely refuse to germinate 
in distilled water, and the contents merely pass on into granular 
degeneration. 
In these experiments on vegetable tissues the primary effect of 
starvation seems to consist in a gradual analysis of the complex 
amalgam constituting the protoplasm, and of a precipitation of 
oily matter from it. This is followed by transformation affect- 
ing the albuminoid constituents, and ultimately leading to their 
more or less complete conversion into fat. Vegetable proto- 
plasm, according to most recent observations, consists of a 
combination of albuminous substances with water and small 
quantities of incombustible material. In most cases it also con- 
tains, as may be concluded on physiological grounds, consider- 
able quantities of other organic compounds, belonging probably 
to the series of carbo-hydrates and fats. These admixtures are 
distributed through its mass in an invisible form.^^^ 
The rapidity with which oil granules appear in many instances 
renders it probable that those first produced are the result of a 
separation of pre-existent oil. That the oily material subse- 
quently produced is a new formation is demonstrated by the 
entire disappearance of all other elements from the interior of 
the cells or filaments. 
The contrast between the phenomena attending evolution and 
involution is strikingly exhibited in these experiments. In ger- 
minating spores we find a solution and disappearance of differ- 
entiated oily matter ; in starved filaments, a precipitation of oily 
matter from a previously homogeneous protoplasm. 
II. — Uxperime7its on the Effects of Deficient Supply of Nutritive 
Material on Animal Tissues, 
The animals employed in the experiments on this point were 
the larvae of the common toad of this part of India {Biifo ?nelano- 
sticlus) and of Rana tigrina^ the so-called Bullfrog of Anglo- 
Indians. The procedure followed consisted in retaining the 
larvae in water containing varying amounts of nutritive material, 
or, as far as possible, entirely devoid of it; freshly distilled water 
* ‘Text Book of Botany, Morphological and Physiological,’ by Julius 
Sachs. Translated and annotated by A. W. Bennett aud \V. T. Thistleton 
Dyer. Oxford, 1875, p. 37. 
