It is shown that overabundances of sodium and the neutron-rich isotopes of magnesium, predicted by calculations of explosive nucleosynthesis in a metal-rich environment, are strongly indicated by a variety of recent observations of strong-lined elliptical galaxies. The theoretical sizes of the overabundances are such as to explain the large increase of the strength of the Na D lines in these objects without invoking sizable numbers of dwarfs, as well as the discrepancies in velocity-dispersion measurements obtained from the characteristic widths of galactic spectral lines by various groups. There is need for an explicit evaluation of the effects of abundance increases on line strengths before the dependence of mass-to-light ratios on galactic luminosity or radial distance may be reliably determined.
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R. C. Peterson (1976) studied this question.