Ainjuiyir'i9isln"'  J     Vitamine  Content  of  Philippine  Vegetables.  5I5 
and  Hume  believe  that  in  the  case  of  armies  or  other  populations 
subsisting  largely  on  canned  food,  it  is  imperative  to  provide  an  ade- 
quate supply  of  vitamin  from  outside  sources.  Their  dicta  are :  To 
prevent  beriberi,  the  bread  or  biscuit  should  be  made  from  whole- 
meal or  germ-containing  flour.  To  prevent  scurvy,  if  a  supply  of 
fresh  fruit  or  vegetables  is  not  procurable,  germinated  legumes 
should  be  added  to  the  diet. 
We  may  admit  the  wisdom  of  giving  due  consideration  to  this 
carefully  planned  advice  without  thereby  accepting  the  hypotheses 
that  have  been  injected  into  it.  It  would  be  folly,  we  believe,  to  pro- 
claim any  wholesale  condemnation  of  foods  preserved  with  heat  as 
devoid  of  antiscorbutic  properties  until  far  more  evidence  is  avail- 
able^— evidence  obtained  without  the  prejudice  of  a  preconceived 
theory  of  etiology.  The  propaganda  for  conservation  of  food  by 
drying  must  not  receive  a  setback  until  more  conclusive  proof  of  an 
actual  deficiency  of  any  vitamins  that  they  may  originally  have  con- 
tained is  furnished.  Nor  must  the  interesting  and  valuable  vitamin 
theory  be  allowed  to  overshadow  completely  the  fact  that  calories 
are  necessary  for  nutrition. 
VITAMINE  CONTENT  OF  SOME  PHILIPPINE 
VEGETABLES.1 
By  H.  C.  Brill  and  C.  Alincastre. 
No  reliable  quantitative  methods  for  the  estimation  of  vitamines 
have  been  perfected,  and  it  is  probable  that  in  the  processes  used  for 
their  isolation  some  of  them  are  broken  up  into  simpler  substances. 
Funk  (Biochem.  J.,  1913,  7,  211)  determined  the  vitamine  content 
of  milk  by  estimating  the  nitrogen  of  the  phosphotungstic  acid  pre- 
cipitate by  the  Kjeldahl  method,  but  subsequently  Drummond  and 
Funk  (Biochem.  1914,  8,  598)  found  that  all  the  nitrogen  of 
vitamine  is  not  obtained  by  means  of  this  method,  since  compounds 
containing  the  pyridine  ring  resist  the  digestion  with  sulphuric  acid, 
and  approximately  only  three  fourths  of  the  nitrogen  of  such  bodies 
is  so  obtained.  The  present  authors  base  their  method  upon  this 
property  of  pyridine  derivatives,  and  proceed  as  follows : 
1  Abstracted  from  Phil.  J.  of  Sci.,  1917,  11,  127-132  through  the  Analyst, 
April,  1918. 
