100 The Philippine Journal of Science 1920 
McCollum and Simmonds believe that there are only two 
diseases caused by deficiency, in the sense that Funk uses the 
term; namely, polyneuritis and a condition characterized prin- 
cipally by retarded growth, malnutrition, and xerophthalmia 
consisting of oedema of the eyelids, corneal opacity, and purulent 
secretion. They are due to inadequate quantities of water sol- 
uble B and fat soluble A, respectively. According to these 
authors scurvy, pellagra, and rickets are not due to lack of 
specific vitamines in the foods as formerly believed by Funk, 
but to an unbalanced diet. 
In our work on the biologic assay of the different tikitiki 
extracts made in Manila, we have observed blindness associated 
with marked cachexia in the controls and the test fowls. All 
five controls, which were fed exclusively on polished rice, devel- 
oped polyneuritis — one with blindness, but it lived for more 
than one hundred days. 
Of the thirty fowls which received polished rice and 5 mils 
of tikitiki extract daily, five developed polyneuritis, and seven 
developed xerophthalmia and died. Xerophthalmia appeared in 
these animals from the seventh to the seventy-ninth day of the 
experiment. 
From these experiments we may deduce : 
1. That polished rice is lacking not only in water soluble B 
which prevents polyneuritis, but also in fat soluble A which 
presides over the processes of growth and prevents the occur- 
rence of xerophthalmia. 
2. That tikitiki extract contains the water soluble B, but does 
not contain the fat soluble A. 
McCollum and Davis have shown, in their experiments on 
rats, that rice polishings, which contain most of the fat, do 
not contain the fat soluble A; or, if they do contain it, it is 
in such insignificant amounts as to be insufficient to promote 
growth in these animals. 
In later experiments, we shall endeavor to determine whether 
fat-soluble A is present or not in unpolished rice, using fowls 
instead of rats as our experimental animals. We are under the 
impression that unpolished rice contains this growth -promoting 
factor, for otherwise we can conceive of no reasonable expla- 
nation of the fact that chickens confined in cages for prolonged 
periods of time and fed on nothing but unpolished rice could 
live and remain in apparently perfect condition. We suppose 
that this is also the explanation of the common practice in the 
Islands of fattening chickens by keeping them confined in very 
