On the Presence of the Amylolytic Ferment and Its Zymogen in the Salivary Glands

The action of chloroform in preventing or delaying putrefaction was shown by several investigators rather more than twenty years ago. 3¢[iintz* seems to have been the first to point out that the use of chloroform water or the addition of chloroform to a liquid destroys living ferments (or a fermentation dependent upon life), but does not injure the ferments or enzymes themselves. This important bactericidal power attracted but little attention at the time, although it aroused a certain amount of opposition, which seems to have come largely from those interested in the more purely surgical aspects of the propositions advanced by Miintz. Whatever the reason may have been, but little practical use was made of the discovery for a number of years. In 1888 attention was again directed to the great value of chloroform water as a preservative liquid in which micro-organisms live with difficulty or not at all, while the ferments are not materially affected by it. The re~dval of interest in this useful addition to our methods is due to E. Salkowski.'~ I t seemed to us desirable to employ chloroform water for making extracts of the salivary glands in the hope of determining qualitatively the presence of the amy]olytic ferment (ptyalin) and perhaps of its forerunner (ptyalinogen) in the gland as distinguished from the saliva.$ We have accordingly extracted many glands of different