RENAL FUNCTION AND THE AMOUNT OF FUNCTIONING TISSUE

This is the first of a short series of papers, the outcome of an attempt to draw quantitative structural deductions from functional results. The few methods used are discussed and criticized only in reference to the question as to whether the results give information in regard to the amount of secreting tissue in the kidney. This narrow point of view has been adopted because the purpose of the inquiry is entirely utilitarian and clinical. All manifestations of renal function have an intrinsic interest from the standpoint of physiology, but it is maintained that only those from which we can draw quantitative conclusions about the amount of tissue in the kidney are of immediate and practical clinical importance. Such an idea is foreign to nearly all the recent work on this subject. Nevertheless, from the time of Bright up to about the beginning of the last decade, the hope that functional