VERY little information is available regarding’ the chemical composition of the multitude of plant and animal organisms which collectively are termed plankton and which form the primary food supply on which all marine animal life directly or indirectly subsists. This is, of course, due to the difficulty of collecting sufficient material for adequate examination, and although the quantities available for our experiments were not as large as we would have desired, we think the results are sufficiently interesting to merit a report.
The material investigated by us consisted of a number of small samples of the oily constituents extracted from phyto- and zooplankton collected in the spring and summer of 1928 at Port Erin. Full facilities for the work of extraction were very kindly provided at the Sir William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry during the months of October to December, 1928, five months after the phytoplankton and three months after...
