of albumin of compounds of the fatty series. There is also an aromatic group—a pyridine group—and a group belonging to the category of sugars. Imagine a certain grouping of these four series. This would be the nucleus of the molecule of albumin. If we graft on to this nucleus, on to this framework as it were, so many annexes, or lateral chains, the building will be loaded with embellishments; it will have been made unstable and ipso facto appropriate for the part that it plays in the incessant transformations of the organism.
Kossel's Analysis. Hexonic Nucleus.—Kossel has approached the problem in another fashion. He did not attempt to attack the albumin of the egg. This body is, in fact, a heterogeneous mixture as complex as the needs of the embryo of which it forms the food. Kossel tried a physiologically simpler albuminoid. He got it from an anatomical element having no nutritive rôle, of a very elementary organization and physiological functional activity, and yet one of energetic vitality—the male generating cell. Instead of the hen's egg he therefore analyzed the milt of fish, and, in the first place, of salmon. As was to be expected from what has been said of the proteids, this living matter gives a combination of the nuclein, already known, with an albumin. The latter is abundant, forming a quarter of the total mass. Its reaction is strongly alkaline, which is the general characteristic of the variety of albumin known by the name of histones. Miescher, the learned chemist of Basle, who had noticed this basic albumin when working on the Rhine salmon, gave it the name of protamin. This is the substance submitted by Kossel to analysis in preference to the albumin of
