THE excitement of the race to establish the formulae of vitamins has diverted interest from other branches of the science of nutrition; but now that so many vitamins have been synthesized, attention is turning more and more to the study of the metabolism of inorganic substances.
Many elements are essential for growth, and, in a number of cases, the quantities required are no larger than the quantities of vitamins required, but there are still many obvious gaps in our knowledge of their action.
The experimental methods developed for the study of vitamins may be applied to the study of mineral metabolism, but the practical problems are different; the isolation of the active principle, so important in the case of vitamins, is no problem at all, and the main initial difficulty is to devise diets from which the active principle is absent.
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