Look Out for ``A''Source: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Aug., 1925), pp. 222-223Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/7515 .

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222 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTIILY

determined. If it can be we may be able some day to determine not only how old a person actually is, but why. And if the growth-promoting and the growth-restraining factors can be identified and independently prepared it may be possible to regulate their balance and restore it when it is disturbed.

LOOK OUT FOR "A"

WE are beginning to learn our ABC's in the field of vitamins and even the groceryman can tell us which of his eatables are richest in those elusive but essential factors that the chemist has not yet been able to extract and identify.

Yet it is only twelve years since the first one was found, or to speak more accurately, found necessary. This is the one called "vitamin A" and its importance was discovered in the course of feeding experiments when it was found, contrary to what was then assumed,, that all fats were not quite the same in food value, that, lard was not so good as butter, and that olive oil was not so good as fish oil, and that white corn was not so good as yellow corn in promoting growth if they were the only source of fat in the nation. That is, all the fats and oils are almost equally edible and nutritious and digestible and useful in furnishing fuel to run the engines of the body, but some of them, and only some of them, have in them besides a little of something else that the body must have for growth and health.

A new series of very carefully conducted experiments by Professor H. C. Sherman, of Columbia, has shown that vitamin A is also necessary for the production of offspring. He matched twin white rats of the same litter and sex. One set was fed whole milk powder, the other skimmed milk powder. In other experiments one set was fed butter fat and the other lard or coconut fat. In other respects the rations were the same, mostly ground whole wheat. The first set therefore lived on a diet con- taining an ample supply of vitamin A, while the other lot had a ration that was poor in vitamin A.

The difference was striking. Both lots of the rats grew up to maturity in about the same time, but the rats that had plenty of A grew bigger and lived longer and produced more young. The rats on the low-vitamin diet weighed only 69 per cent. as much as their better fed brethren. The rats that had plenty of A lived more than twice as long as the average.

But the most striking difference was in the breeding records. The 17 females on the diets richer in vitamin A had a total of 477 young of which they raised 264. The 17 females on the diets poorer in vitamin A gave birth to only 31, and none of these lived longer than two days. Both sets had plenty of the recently discovered "fertility vitamin" X or E, since wheat germ was in both rations.

Another significant fact is that the rats on the vitamin-poor diet showed a greater "susceptibility to infection and particularly a tendency to break down with lung disease at an age corresponding to that at which pulmonary tuberculosis so often develops in young men and women."

Animals that have lived on a liberal diet will store up enough vitamin A to last a long time if they are deprived of it. Nine tenths of this is laid up in the liver. But it does not appear that any animal has the power to make this vitamin out of any foods that do not contain it. It is most abundant in cod-liver oil, butter, whole milk, liver, herring, egg yolk,

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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 223

alfalfa, clover, cabbage, carrots, sweet potatoes and spinach. It is practi- cally absent from Irish potatoes, lean meat, malt extract, wheat bran, grapes, olive oil, corn oil, lard, tallow and yeast cakes. We do not need much of A, but we need that little much.

LEGISLATIVE ORTHODOXY

IN 1899 the legislature of Indiana undertook to establish a new value of Pi, that indispensable but inconvenient number which represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. (?4rt.inl, +bi+, nooAc Cafnrnn ar ?lflnb a" Owr

thing in the world. It begins 3.141592 . . . and goes like that forever; at least nobody has got to an end of the decimal, although mathematicians have worked it out to more than 700 places.

So when an Indianian ex-teacher offered to give the state the right to use free in the state schools his proof that the true value of Pi was an even 4, the legislators jumped at the chance, and a bill establishing that value was introduced and passed unanimously through three readings in the lower house and two in the upper. Of course, like politicians generally, they never thought of seeking expert advice, so Purdue and the state university were not consulted; but a member of the Indiana Academy of Sciences, C. A. Waldo, coming to see after the academy appropriation, found the lower house calling the roll on the final reading of the Pi bill. That evening he visited such senators as he could see and gave them a lesson in elementary geometry; consequently, it was defeated on its third and final reading in the senate.

If it had not been for this accidental intervention the teachers of Indiana would have had to teach a false formula to their students, and what would have happened to the trains that went around the curves laid out on this figure, and to the domes of buildings and the arches of bridges, and machinery made in the shops, so calculated, is appalling to contemplate. The Egyptians 1700 years before Christ had figured out Pi as 3.16, so that from yonder pyramids thirty-six centuries would have looked down upon Indiana. I do not know what penalty was imposed by the Indiana act upon a teacher whose students when they measured a circle got an illegal result. A statute of Oxford University in 1583 provided that any master or bachelor who deviated from the doctrine of Aristotle on any point should pay a fine of five shi'llings for each such offense. I do not know whether the rule has been repealed yet or not. Probably not. Oxford rarely repeals. But while it was enforced a teacher could not often afford the luxury of mentioning that the earth moves. A school prospectus of later times announces that students will be taught either that the sun moves or the earth moves, according to which parents prefer. Perhaps our private schools will soon be inserting in their appli- cation blanks; "Please specify whether you want your child taught the monkey or the Moses theory."

Heresy comes higher than it used to. Instead of five shillings a teacher in Tennessee may be fined five hundred dollars for each offense of teaching "that man has descended from a lower order of animals." At that rate, a teacher might lose his year's salary for a slip of the tongue, or for point- ing inadvertently to a fossil bed, from which students might draw an illicit inference.

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