Studies in Protein Hydrolysis

It is well known that proteins are built up of various proportions of different amino-acids, and that on hydrolysis they are broken down, giving proteoses, peptones, polypeptides, and finally their constituent amino-acids. The study of the ultimate products of hydrolysis has been extensively pursued, but, as yet, little light has been thrown upon the initial stages of the hydrolytic decomposition, and it was with the view of finding out something about the earlier steps in the degradation of the protein molecule, and incidentally to compare the behaviour of two proteins under the same conditions, that the following work was carried out.