Newcombe. — Cellulose- Enzymes. 
57 
in like acidulated water showed no other change than a slight 
swelling and lamination. Sections of the endosperm of 
Phoenix dactylifera were kept for three months at 32° to 34 0 
temperature in water, both chloroformed and acidulated with 
hydrochloric acid, and then displayed no perceptible change 
under the microscope. These results should remove all 
doubt as to the solvent action of the extracts here used, and 
incidentally dispose of the caution suggested by Reinitzer 1 
when he proposed that Griiss’s 2 results with Barley-malt- 
extract on Date-endosperm might have been due to the 
conversion of chloroform to hydrochloric acid. 
B. Extract of Aspergillus Oryzae . 
It has been known for many years that the Fungus 
Aspergillus Oryzae has the power of converting starch into 
sugar. More recently an extract of this Fungus has been 
prepared as a proprietary article under the name Taka- 
diastase^ which is sold as an aid to the digestion of starchy 
foods. As far as I know the extract has been tested merely 
with regard to its action on starch. We shall see that it 
actively hydrolyzes reserve cellulose also. 
The commercial extract is a brownish-white powder almost 
wholly soluble in thirty times its weight of water. As with 
the Barley-malt-extract so with this, sections of the Barley- 
grain were employed to determine the cellulose-dissolving 
power. The sections were killed, freed from starch, and each 
mounted in three drops of the ferment-solution on a glass 
slide just as had been done in the Barley-extract. Here also 
the ferment-solution was acidulated with hydrochloric acid, 
and the preparations were placed in the presence of vapour of 
water and chloroform in an oven at a temperature of 3 2° to 34 0 . 
The endosperm-walls of the Barley became hyaline within 
a few hours, the process being different from what it was in 
the Barley-extract. In the latter, a middle band of the wall 
1 Ueber das Zellwandlosende Enzym der Gerste : Zeitschr. f. physiol. Chemie, 
xxiii. 180. 
2 L. c. 
