158 
MR. BRODIE ON CEROTIC ACID. 
however that wax made under very different conditions of climate and vegetation to 
ours might possibly have a different constitution. With this view I procured, through 
the kindness of a friend who was resident in Ceylon, some bees’-wax from that island. 
The wax as I received it was white, having in all respects the appearance of English 
wax, and melting at 63° C, In other points also, as I shall show in another paper, 
its chemical nature was the same as that of English wax. The cerotic acid how- 
ever was entirely absent. When extracted in the boiling alcohol a portion of the 
wax dissolves ; but on the addition of acetate of lead to the alcoholic solution hardly 
a trace of precipitate is formed. 
Such a variation in the nature of an insect-secretion under different conditions of 
life is a remarkable fact, which we may place by the side of the curious difference in 
the nature of the constituents of butter in different years, discovered by Lerch. 
In his excellent investigation on the nature’ of the volatile acids of butter, this chemist 
discovered* that the butyric and caproic acids of one year were in another year 
replaced by vaccinic acid, an acid from which, by deoxidation, the two former acids 
might readily be formed. 
Vaccinic acid. Butyric acid. Caproic acid. 
The cerotic acid, C 54 H 54 O 4 , although far removed in the series of fatty acids from 
these volatile acids of butter, yet nevertheless belongs to the same chemical series of 
bodies, to that series, namely, which contain carbon and hydrogen in equal equi- 
valent proportions, and which, theoretically at least, are capable of being produced 
by deoxidation from sugar or from starch. 
Any fact is of importance which can throw light upon the law by which these sub- 
stances are truly convertible, one into the other, and it would be highly interesting 
to investigate, in those waxes where the cerotic acid is not found, by what bodies, if 
any, it can be replaced. 
* Annalen d. Ch, und Pharm. vol xlix. p. 230. 
13 Albert Road, Regent's Park, 
February 2Qth, 1848. 
