The repeated intramuscular injections of aqueous emulsions and alcohol-ether extracts of sterile normal rabbit brains in some manner produced pathological changes accompanied by myelin destruction in the brains of 7 of 8 monkeys (Macacus rhesus). Eight, control monkeys remained well. Cultures from the involved brains remained sterile, and no transmissible agent was demonstrated by means of intracerebral inoculations of emulsions of bits of the brains into monkeys, rabbits, guinea pigs, and white mice.

Since the discovery of hemolysins by Border attempts have been made to demonstrate antibodies against practically every type of cell and tissue in the body. Most of the efforts were prompted by the idea that certain diseases, for example nephritis and diabetes, characterized by degenerative changes in the affected organs, might be due to the development of antibodies against the tissues of the particular organ involved. However, the early claims made for the specificity of organ antibodies have been discounted to such an extent by later more seasoned work that the theories evolved from them have been discarded in the majority of instances. In the period since 1926, Brandt, Guth, and Mifller (1) and others (2,3,4) have demonstrated that brain tissue contains an alcohol-soluble lipoid which functions as a haptene and that when this lipoid is mixed with a heterologous protein a complete antigen is formed capable of inciting in animals the development of complement-fixing antibodies which are organ-rather than speciesspecific. This discovery again opens, for brain at least, the question of the etiological r61e of organ-specific antibodies in certain degenerative diseases and strengthens materially the hypothesis that the encephalomyelitis which follows antirabies vaccination, if not the entire group of postinfection encephalitides, is in some manner associated with the development of specific antibodies for brain. EXPERIMENTALSince a number of workers (2, 4) have already shown that fresh emulsions of homologous brain possess little or no antigenicity and that only when a heterologous protein is added to the brain haptene does it become a complete antigen, we were interested to see whether certain degenerative processes such as autolysis are capable of altering 560ANTIGEI~'ICITY OF HOMOLOGOUS BRAIN homologous brain material to such an extent that it becomes a complete antigenic complex. If this proved to be so, we planned to study the characteristics of the antigen as well as of the antibodies elicited by it. To this end rabbits were injected (1) with freshly prepared emulsions of rabbit brain, ~2) with similar emulsions to which pig serum had been added, (3) with sterile emulsions of rabbit brain that had been allowed to stand at room temperature for 5 to 30 days, (4) with fresh emulsions prepared from rabbit brains experimentally infected with vaccine virus, and (5) with alcoholic extracts of rabbit brain plus pig serum. Following the injections sera of the animals were examined by means of complement fixation tests for the presence of antibodies against aqueous emulsions and alcoholic extracts of various organs. MethodsRabbits.---Only young mature rabbits averaging 2000 gin. in weight were used. To insure a maximum uniformity in the antibody response, only pure-strain self-blue English rabbits received injections. The rabbits which received injections of emulsions of brain infected with vaccine virus were immunized 2 weeks prior to the initiation of the experiment by means of intradermal injections of 0.25 cc. of...

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