We shall not discuss the subject of vitamines in general, but confine ourselves to the more limited field of the antiscorbutic vitamine. The recognition of the "accessory" dietary factors is of such recent date, however, that it will be well to consider briefly how attention came to be directed to them and how their existence was ascertained. As in the case of so many scientific discoveries, it is difficult to point to the exact time when the advance was made. On looking back we find that Lunin, in 1881, noting that mice were unable to live on a diet consisting of protein, fats, carbohydrates, salts and water, came to the conclusion "that other substances indispensable to nutrition must be present in milk besides caseinogen, fat, lactose and salts." This work did not stimulate similar investigations, nor did Lunin, as might have been expected, allude to scurvy. The work which focussed attention on this novel aspect of dietetics was the report of Eijkman, in 1897, to the effect that when fowl are fed decorticated rice, they develop a disease resembling beriberi, and that the paralytic symptoms disappear on feeding them rice polishings or its alcoholic extract. Here, for the first time, was a positive rather than a negative experiment, and one capable of simple verification. The subject was placed on a scientific basis by the classic investigation of Hopkins, who experimented with purified food substances, and demonstrated how diets which were deficient could be rendered adequate. As early as 1906 he wrote "the animal body is adjusted to live either upon plant tissues or other animals, and these contain countless substances other than the proteins, carbohydrates and fats." "In diseases such as rickets, and particularly in scurvy, we have had for long years knowledge of a dietetic factor, but though we know how to benefit these conditions empirically, the real errors in the diet are to this day quite obscure." The work of Osborne and Mendel, and McCollum and Davis in this country, of Schaumann, Funk, Stepp and others, all led to the conclusion that purified diets are unable to satisfy the nutritive requirements of rats or mice, and that extracts of the natural foods suffice to render the diet adequate. The same rule holds for man, who, when deprived of these vitamines, develops the so-called deficiency diseases--typically modern disorders. Regarded as a group, they are a consequence of our altered mode of life and peculiar civilization. They follow naturally upon the development of immense cities housing millions of people, who necessarily must receive perishable foodstuffs produced at a great distance. To even a greater extent they are the product of countless ingenious methods devised mainly to render foods stable--drying, heating, the addition of preservatives--most of which accomplish their object, but incidentally rob the food of its essential vitamine.