1198 Stoward.—Amyloclastic Secretory Capacities of the 
ground tissue ; the time and temperature of digestion being identical with 
those of the preceding series, viz. twenty hours at 30° C. 
Finally, experimental digestions in all the series were arrested by 
boiling their contents, care being taken subsequently, in those in which 
chloroform served as the antiseptic, to expel this reagent. After cooling, 
diluting to 100 c.c., and filtering, duplicate copper reductions were carried 
out on the filtrates in the usual manner. 
The following table comprises the results yielded by digestions of 
the leaves of the plant:— 
TABLE XLIX. 
Amylase Content of Petals of Tropaeolum. 
Digestion method . 
Antiseptic. 
°*5 % papain. 1 % papain. Auto. Direct. 
Amylase per grm. of tissue per 20 hours 
{equivalent to mg. of Cu). (a) (b) 
Chloroform 
Toluene 
Nitrobenzene 
446 
384 
446 
I3H 
1261 
446 
396 
47 1 
1339 
1389 
434 
396 
496 
I3H 
1289 
The experimental conditions, as the above table indicates, were varied 
by the employment of three different antiseptics and two different con¬ 
centrations of papain. Direct-digestion results were so markedly dif¬ 
ferent in order of magnitude from those of the other methods that a 
second series ( b ) was carried out in order to be doubly sure of the 
result. 
Obviously the amylase in an actively metabolizing tissue like that 
of the plant examined does not presumably exist in the latent condition. 
The behaviour of the enzyme under the conditions introduced by diges¬ 
tion with papain appears to parallel those found in the case of the seed¬ 
ling and the aleurone layer of barley seed during the advance of the 
germinative processes. 
The greatest divergence occurs in the case of the leaf tissues, as the 
following results, carried out under experimental conditions identical with 
those in the preceding experiments, show. 
Whether, after the tissue has passed the heyday of its existence, 
papain-digestion would induce enzymatic augmentation, as it apparently 
does in the case of the endospermic substance of ungerminated barley, or 
whether the conditions provided by the leaf tissues per se as in direct 
digestion are superior to those provided by papain, must remain a question 
for future research to determine. 
