be mentioned that appropriate experiments have clearly demonstrated that the different sugars available as food are not absorbed from the intestine in harmony with their diffusion velocity, but show deviations therefrom which can be explained only on the ground that the intestinal wall exercises some selective action, due to the living cells composing it. Likewise interesting in their bearing on nutrition are the observations of Hofmeister,[13] who finds by experiments on dogs that the assimilation limit of the different sugars shows marked variation. Thus, dextrose, levulose, and cane-sugar have the highest assimilation, while milk-sugar is far less easily and completely assimilated. If this is equally true of man, it indicates that starchy foods, with their ultimate conversion into dextrose, are to be ranked as having a high assimilation limit, thus affording additional evidence of their high nutritive value. [13] Franz Hofmeister: Ueber Resorption und Assimilation der Nährstoffe. Archiv f. d. exper. Pathol. u. Pharm., Band 25, p. 240. In the absorption of proteid products, their passage from the intestine by way of the portal circulation insures exposure to the action of the hepatic cells, before they are distributed by the general circulation throughout the body. It is only under conditions of an excessive intake of proteid foods that their products are absorbed by way of the lymphatics. These points are clearly established, and there is every ground for believing that substantial reasons exist to account for this single line of departure. Just what the liver does, however, is uncertain. In fact, as already indicated, there is lack of definite knowledge as to how far the proteid foods are broken down in digestion, prior to absorption. The combined action of pepsin, trypsin, and erepsin, if sufficiently long continued, can accomplish a complete disruption of the proteid molecule. We are inclined to assume in a general way that the “proteids taken as food cannot find a place in the economy of the animal body till they have been, as it were, melted down and recast.”[14] How far this melting down or disruption extends in normal digestion, we do not at present know. As already stated, neither proteoses and peptones, nor the amino-acids, are found in the blood stream in sufficient amounts, or with that frequency, to suggest absorption in these forms. Possibly, as some physiologists have suggested, the amount of any of these products to be found at any one time in a given quantity of blood is too small for certain recognition, yet in the twenty-four hours the amount passing from intestine to liver might be sufficiently large to equal the total proteid absorbed. We can, however, at present only conjecture, and must rest content with the simple statement that in the digestion of the proteid foodstuffs, proteoses, peptones, and amino-acids are formed, and that by transformation or total reconstruction of these products, special