The substance is soluble in water and passes through a parchment membrane
or a porcelain filter. Unlike the "B" it is apparently not adsorbed by
fine precipitates such as fullers' earth or colloidal iron. Harden and
Zilva showed that when a mixture of equal volumes of autolysed yeast and
orange juice is treated with fuller's earth the "B" is removed and the "C"
left unaltered. Eddy and La Mer have treated orange juice with fullers'
earth and then tested the filtered off juice as cure and preventive of
scurvy in guinea pigs. Their results showed that 6-2/3 cc. of the treated
juice was curative, hence the loss due to adsorption must be less than 60
per cent to 70 per cent. Harden and Zilva were among the first to state
that the vitamine is much more stable in acid than in alkali. They have
shown, that even 1/50 N sodium hydrate at room temperature has a rapidly
destructive effect. On the other hand Delf showed that when 0.5 gm. citric
acid is added to the water in which germinated lentils are boiled, the
loss of the antiscorbutic properties is, if anything, greater than when no
addition of acid is made. She therefore concluded that in cooking
vegetables there should be no addition of either acid or alkali to the
cooking water if one wishes to conserve this vitamine. Sherman, La Mer, and
Campbell have been engaged in experiments bearing on this point throughout
the past two years. Some of their results have recently been published and
their observations are worthy of special attention from their bearing on
the character of reaction of the vitamine in general. They first proceeded
to determine the amount of filtered tomato juice just necessary to produce
scurvy in degrees extending from no protection to complete protection and
they also constructed a basal diet which is apparently optimum in
nutrients and all other factors except the "C" vitamine. They found that
at the natural acidity of tomato juice (pH 4.2) boiling for one hour
destroyed practically 50 per cent of the antiscorbutic power and by
boiling for four hours they destroyed 70 per cent, which indicates that
the curve of the destructive process tends to flatten more than that of a
unimolecular reaction. This result was confirmed by heating experiments
conducted at 60°, 80° and 100°. In all cases the temperature coefficients
are low. (Q_10 equals 1.1-1.3) confirming Delf's results. When the natural
acidity of the juice was first neutralized in whole or in part, the juice
then boiled for an hour and immediately cooled and reacidified, it was
found that at less than half neutralization (pH 5.1-4.9) the destructive
effect of an hour's boiling was increased to 58 per cent. When alkali was
added to an initial pH 11 (about N/40 titratable alkali to
phenolphthalein) which fell to 9 during the hour's boiling the destructive
effect was about 65 per cent. When reacidification was omitted and the
neutralized boiled juice stored in a refrigerator for five days before
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