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