VITAMINES.

Taranaki Daily News, 13 August 1921, Page 10

VITAMINES.

Writing in the *English Review, Professor Julian Huxley says nobody yet knows what a v’itamine is chemically, and nobody has yet succeeded in isolating one. \Ve know, however, what they i do, and where they occur, and that is already a great deal. Professor Hopkins, of Cambridge, discovered that if a diet was made up of protein, carbo-hydrate, fat, and salts, all chemically pure, young animals —rats in this case—would not grow on it, although it contained ample substance both for energy and for repair. They not only would not grow, but soon lost weight, and died within a week or so. The addition of an apparently negligible quantity of milk, however—a mere two or three cubic centimetres a day —restored the animals to health al once. The substance lacking in the origial diet was what is now generally called fat-soluble vitamine A. These vitamines, though absolutely necessary to growth, health, and continued life itself, yet need to be present only in infinitessima) quantities to produce their effects, and with knowledge of other properties, it should be. possible to wipe out rickets, the prevalent malnutrition disease of children, within half a century at the utmost.