At this point it must be explained that in the original state the rice proper is surrounded by a skin, the pericarp, which may be white, or yellow, or red, or nearly black, or any combination of these colors. Outside the pericarp is the husk. The "polished" rice, white in color, results from a process of milling whereby the pericarp and the entire outer portions are removed. "Cured" rice still retains some pericarp, but no husk. In our description so far, wherever rice was stated to be the cause of beriberi, the reference was to the highly polished variety.*

The cooked rice that had been given the fowls was "polished" rice. Eijkman quickly followed up his preliminary investigation by showing that polished rice always induced polyneurites in birds, and that the addition of some unpolished rice, or merely its outer coating, which is discarded in milling, immediately brings relief. Clearly enough the outer coating of rice must have contained something which brought about the cure, and the absence of which caused the disease.

* The European and American diet is usually so varied that no amount of polished rice in our diet will induce beriberi. The case is often different with Orientals.

As a matter of fact, Eijkman considered the large carbohydrate supply (in rice) to give rise to bacterial poisons in the intestine, and he thought that the outer coating of the rice possessed an antidote for the poison produced.

Eijkman next turned his attention to human beings. He investigated 27 of the native prisons in Java. Wherever "polished" rice was fed to the prisoners, beriberi raged; in some cases the afflicted numbered 50 per cent of the total number of prisoners. But where the unpolished or "cured" variety was used, but few cases developed. The men behaved like the fowls and like birds in general.

Eijkman's work placed a powerful weapon in the hands of medical men. For the first time they had a readily available means of studying a disease which had wrought havoc to vast populations. Birds were always available. They were as available to the investigator in Europe as to the one in Asia. Any laboratory in any part of the five continents could now pursue such investigations. But every laboratory did not. In fact, Eijkman's publication found a nice resting place on the least accessible of shelves, and there rested quite undisturbed for a number of years.

Notice how both Takaki and Eijkman were reaching appreciably nearer to the goal. Takaki was right when he attributed beriberi to a faulty diet, but he was wrong when he believed the cause to be due to too little protein. He was right again in suggesting the addition of meat and vegetables and eggs to the diet, for now we know that the vitamine present in the outer portion of the rice - and there is such a vitamine there, though there is no substance that acts as an antidote to intestinal poisons - is also present, to a greater or less extent, in foods; but of course Takaki did not know it.

In the meantime, physiologists and bio-chemists (or physiological chemists, as they sometimes call themselves), who were not clinical men, were arriving at certain conclusions regarding the importance of diet which, later on, beautifully corroborated the clinical findings. These two groups of workers began boring a tunnel from two opposite ends. Eventually they met.