The relation of rice to this disease was more than a suspicion even in 1898. In 1897 a Dutch chemist, Eijkman, had succeeded in producing in fowls a similar set of symptoms by feeding them with polished rice alone. This set of symptoms he called polyneuritis and this term is now commonly used to signify a beri-beri in experimental animals. Eijkman found that two or three weeks feeding sufficed to produce these symptoms and it was he who first showed that the addition of the rice polishings to the diet was sufficient to relieve the symptoms. Eijkman first thought that the cortical material contained something necessary to neutralize the effects of a diet rich in starch. Later however, he changed his view and in 1906 his position was practically the view of today. In that same year (1906) F. Gowland Hopkins in England had come to the conclusion that the growth of laboratory animals demanded something in foods that could not be accounted for among the ordinary nutrients. He gave to these hypothetical substances the name "accessory food factors." To Hopkins and to Eijkman may therefore be justly attributed the credit of calling the world's attention to the unknown substances which Funk was to christen a little later with the name vitamines. Other workers, of course, knew of these experiments of Eijkman and Hopkins and in 1907 two of them, Fraser and Stanton, reported that by extracting rice polishings with alcohol they had secured a product which if added to the diet of a sufferer from beri-beri seemed to produce curative effects. It is obvious that logic would have decreed that some of these workers should be the ones to identify and name the curative material. But history is not bound by the rules of logic and it was so in this case. Another student had been attracted to the problem and was working at the time in Germany where he also became acquainted with Eijkman's results and began the investigation of rice polishings on experimental lines. This student was Casimir Funk and a little later he carried his studies to England where he developed the results that made him the first to announce the discovery of the unknown factor which he christened vitamine. Funk's studies combined a careful chemical fractioning of the extracts of rice polishings with tests for their antineuritic power upon polyneuritic birds, after the manner taught by Eijkman. By carrying out this fractioning and testing he obtained from a large volume of rice polishings a very small amount of a crystalline substance which proved to be curative to a high degree. A little later he demonstrated that this same substance was particularly abundant in brewers' yeast. From these two sources he obtained new extracts and carefully repeated his analytical fractionings. The result was the demonstration that they contained a substance which could be reduced to crystalline form and was therefore worthy of being considered a chemical substance.