Experience has shown that it is dangerous to draw conclusions from experiments of too short duration or to base them on too few animals. For complete data the experiments should be carried through the complete life cycle of the rat, including the reproductive period. Otherwise it may turn out that the amount in the unknown while apparently sufficient for normal growths is incapable of sustaining the drain made in reproduction. It is this consideration that makes the accumulation of authoritative data on vitamine contents of foodstuffs so slow and tedious and one of the reasons why we lack satisfactory tables in this particular at present. Osborne and Mendel raise another point of methodology and believe that more accurate results will be obtained if the source of the vitamine is fed separately than if mixed with the basal diet. It is easily possible that since one of the effects of lack of vitamine, especially of the "B" type, is poor appetite, the amount necessary to produce normal growth may be smaller than would appear from results obtained by mixing it in the basal diet. When so mixed the animals do not get enough to maintain appetite and really decline because they do not eat enough rather than because the amount of vitamine given is inadequate to growth. Details of this kind are matters however that particularly concern the experimentalist and as our purpose here is to merely describe the methodology we may perhaps turn now to other types of testing. Before doing so it is perhaps unnecessary to suggest that in all experiments it is important that the food intake consumed be measured. Also that in all such experimentation it is necessary to run controls on a complete diet rather than to rely too much on standard figures. For this latter purpose it is merely necessary to add to the basal diets the "A" as butter fat and the "B" as dried yeast or otherwise to make them complete. Various special mixtures have been tested out for this purpose and the data already presented supplies the information necessary to construct such control diets. Professor Sherman has given me the following as a control diet on which he has raised rats at normal growth rate to the fifth generation: