  Qualitons, topological excitations with the quantum numbers of quarks, may
provide an accurate description of what is meant by constituent quarks in QCD.
Their existence hinges crucially on an effective Lagrangian description of QCD
in which a pseudoscalar colour-octet of fields enters as a new variable. We
show here how such new fields may be extracted from the fundamental QCD
Lagrangian using the gauge-symmetric collective field technique.
