exposure to heat until a temperature approaching the coagulation point of serum is reached. In reality, however, when this is re-investigated quantitatively,[1] it emerges that the antitryptic power of the serum is reduced by one-third to one-half when we subject the serum to a temperature of 60° C. for ten minutes.
That difficulty having been removed out of the way of our hypothesis, we may proceed to take cognisance of the results of the crucial test experiments—experiments in which graduated additions of trypsin are made to serum as a preliminary to the implantation of sero-saprophytic microbes. The outcome of these experiments can be summed up in a sentence. When we add trypsin in quantities sufficient to reduce appreciably the antitryptic power, but insufficient to give us any free trypsin, the serum is converted into an eminently favourable nutrient medium for sero-saprophytic microbes.
Our hypothesis is thus very strikingly confirmed. It will be necessary hereafter to follow it into all its
- ↑ The quantitative method here employed was in essentials that described in my "Technique of the Teat and the Capillary Glass Tube." It was varied only in the respect that the series of trypsin, serum, and calcined milk mixtures, which are employed in that method, were taken up, not into a many-stemmed pipette, but into a long, unmounted, wide-bored capillary stem, which had, for the purpose of convenient filling in, been bent round at one end in the flame of a Bunsen into a siphoning curve.
