Am.  jour.  Pharm.  i      Eldrin,  a  New  Plant  Constituent. 
January,  1921.    J  ' 
4i 
For  years  this  yellow  phenomenon  was  before  me,  but  I  could 
not  catch  the  material  that  produced  it.  About  a  year  and  a  half 
ago  I  decided  that  if  I  isolated  this  yellow  something  that  pervaded 
all  plant  tissues  so  linked  with  impurities  as  seemingly  to  defy  iso- 
lation, it  must  be  obtained  from  something  that  is  white,  something 
that  does  not  carry  a  mass  of  extraneous  material  to  contaminate 
the  principle  desired.  Then  it  occurred,  why  not  use  the  petals  of 
a  white  flower  to  get  this  yellow  something? 
The  elder  was  then  in  bloom.  These,  I  found,  turned  deep 
yellow  with  ammonia  gas.  I  procured  fifty  pounds  of  elder  flowers, 
put  them  in  a  percolator,  made  a  tincture,  and  worked  it  by  means 
of  neutral  solvents  and  excluders,  to  rid  the  product  of  the  alcohol, 
chlorophyl  and  wax.  I  had  five  gallons  of  the  chlorophyl-free 
liquid,  and  said  to  Mr.  Miller,  who  was  assisting  me :  ''Place  the 
jar  in  a  cold  situation,  and  tomorrow  morning  I  shall  examine  it." 
Next  morning  I  tipped  the  jar  very  carefully,  and  all  down  the 
sides  were  little  white  concretions  about  the  size  of  pin  heads.  It 
was  the  thing  I  have  been  seeking  forty  years. 
I  took  one  of  those  pin  heads  to  the  laboratory  and  dropped 
it  into  distilled  water  and  it  did  not  dissolve.  I  added  ammonia — 
behold!  it  immediately  dissolved,  the  liquid  turning  deep  yellow.  It 
was  only  the  size  of  a  pin  head,  but  there  were  thousands  of  them. 
And  they  kept  increasing  in  size.  The  marvelous  phase  of  this 
subject  is,  I  got  eleven  ounces  (crude)  of  that  substance  out  of 
that  fifty  pounds  of  elder  flowers.  Before  that,  by  reason  of 
faulty  research,  I  could  not  get  a  grain  from  anything. 
The  first  thought  of  a  pharmacist  is,  what  value  a  new  sub- 
stance may  have  in  medicine.  Alas,  the  greater  part  of  my  work 
has  been  the  repeated  finding  of  something  that  had  no  value.  I 
sent  some  of  this  material  to  Prof.  R.  Adams  Dutcher,  University 
of  Minnesota,  requesting  that  he  make  a  physiological  examination 
of  it.  His  preliminary  report  was  to  the  effect  that,  according 
to  a  preliminary  investigation,  it  had  no  physiological  action.  May 
I  not  ask,  should  a  peculiarity  of  action  be  expected  of  a  substance 
pervading  plant  tissues  everywhere  ?  1 
In  this  cylinder  I  have  distilled  water,  and  I  propose  to  put 
I I  had  vitamines  in  mind,  there  was  reason  to  hope  that  a  general  life 
supporter  of  plant  life,  serviceable  to  animals,  could  be  found  and  isolated. 
Not  a  poison  of  energetic  action.  _  This,  I  accept,  Dr.  Dutcher  demonstrated 
as  a  fallacy  in  the  direction  of  this  substance; 
