Schunc-k. — The Chemistry of Chlorophyll, 77 
give an idea of what has up to the present time been accom- 
plished on this field of inquiry. After describing the products 
formed in the processes of decomposition to which chlorophyll 
has hitherto been submitted, I shall give an account of a 
peculiar reaction, the study of which may possibly throw 
some light on the constitution of chlorophyll. 
The Spontaneous Decomposition of Chlorophyll 
and its Products. 
The bodies described by Hoppe-Seyler, to which I propose 
to refer in this paragraph, are acknowledged by their discoverer 
to be products of decomposition ; but since he does not name 
the agency to which he supposes the decomposition to be due, 
I have used the word spontaneous in connection with them, 
putting on one side for a time the fact that a solution of 
chlorophyll, when light and air are excluded, may be kept 
unchanged for any length of time. 
By extracting fresh grass, which had previously been washed 
with ether in order to remove the wax covering the epidermis 
of the leaves, with boiling absolute alcohol, allowing the ex- 
tract to stand for twenty-four hours, filtering, evaporating 
spontaneously, and treating the crystalline residue which was 
left with cold alcohol, then recrystallising from boiling alcohol 
and from ether, Hoppe-Seyler 1 obtained a substance which he 
named ‘ chlorophyllan,’ and of which he gives the following 
description : — ‘ It separates on evaporation of its ethereal solu- 
tion in spherical grains and crusts consisting of sickle-shaped 
crystals like those of palmitic acid, which are often grouped 
together in rosettes and are dark green with a slight metallic 
lustre by reflected light, brown by transmitted light. The 
substance has the consistence of bees-wax, and adheres so 
tenaciously to glass or metal that it cannot again be separated 
except by redissolving it. It melts at a temperature above 
1 io°C, to a black liquid, which on further heating burns with a 
luminous flame, leaving a coal which burns with difficulty and 
1 Zeitschrift f. Physiologische Chemie, III. 339, IV. 193, V. 75. 
