Abstract
It was suggested by Professor A. E. Jenks of this University that immunological reactions might be used to determine the origin of archæologic relics composed of bone or ivory. To test the feasibility of this project, the following experiment was undertaken.
A fox's skull was roughly cleaned of meat, and the brain was washed out. It was placed on a roof and exposed to the weather for 2 weeks. During this time it became covered with maggots which dried up and dropped off. The skull was then thoroughly scrubbed, rid of practically all adherent soft tissue. Nearly all the teeth dropped out during this operation, and the remainder were extracted. The skull and teeth were again exposed to the weather for 3 weeks, after which they were kept indoors for an additional 2 months.
Four rabbits were injected with fox-serum twice weekly for 12 weeks. The pooled serums precipitated with fox-serum in dilutions up to 1:500,000.
The skull was wrapped in a towel and crushed. The crushed bone was ground to a rather coarse powder, the largest particles being about 0.5 mm. in diameter. The teeth were ground separately. Both bone and teeth were then extracted with a volume of salt-solution slightly less than the volume of ground material, for 2 hours at room-temperature, shaken repeatedly, and kept over night in the ice-box. Precipitin-tests with these extracts were completely negative with the teeth, and very faintly positive with the bone, the reaction with the latter being about the same in degree as with fox-serum diluted 1:100,000.
This experiment indicates that the use of the precipitin-test in identifying archæologic relics, while not absolutely hopeless, is not very promising.
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