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HE herbaceous legume Indigofera spicata Forsk. (pre-T viously Izdigofera eizdecaphylla Jacq.) (5) , also called creeping or trailing indigo, has features which, were it not for its toxic nature,would make it one of the foremost tropical forage legumes. Breeding work with the objective of obtaining a nontoxic strain of creeping indigo has been hampered by the difficulty and expense of experimenting directly on cattle with toxic materials. Since the original finding that creeping indigo was toxic to cattle (9; I O) , all attempts to identify the toxic substance have been with small test animals. Rosenberg and Zoebisch (11) showed that chicks would exhibit characteristic symptoms when fed creeping indigo. Evidence that the toxic chemical is 3-nitropropanoic acid has been brought forward by workers in Puerto Rico and Hawaii (2, 4, 8) u s i n g chicks as test 'Published with the approval of the Director of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station as Technical Paper No. 626.

trate in cotyledons from nonbitter peanuts on the supposition that these substances occur there normally, but at low levels. Substances that stain reddish purple with sulfuric acid plus heat and which chromatograph like the components of the bitter concentrate from hearts were found in the cotyledons. It took 20 times as much cotyledons as hearts to give roughly an equivalent amount of material as measured by glass paper chromatography. Small fragments of the peanut hearts which had adhered to the cotyledons could account for the substances observed. This possibility was ruled out by carving out and discarding the region of the cotyledon joining the heart and cotyledon together.

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