Chapter VI 



Skeletal 'muscle. Nevertheless I cannot pass over the bold attempt 

 made by Chauveau and Kaufmaim (2) . My reasons for drawing atten- 

 tion to their work on the levator labii superioris and the masseter 

 muscles of the horse depend less upon the results which they obtained 

 (some of which do not altogether inspire confidence), than on the grasp 

 which they had of the problem. Their work was conceived along 

 physiological lines ; their idea was to determine the gaseous exchange 

 of the muscles with the least possible abnormality in the conditions 

 of the animal. They took no elaborate precautions against clotting 

 of the blood ; they simply had recourse to the horse as an animal 

 whose blood did not readily clot. They wanted a considerable 

 quantity of blood, for their samples for analysis had to be of the 

 order of lOOc.c. each. They therefore chose a smallish muscle and 

 one belonging to an animal so large that the bleeding entailed was 

 not felt by the animal. They record their surgical operation as 

 being so simple that the animal did not cease chewing its oats while 

 they were at work : thus they reaped the double advantage that the 

 muscles which they were studying had (a) a normal stimulus and 

 (6) a metabolism which was unhampered by anaesthetics whether in 

 rest or activity. There is one final point in which one could wish that 

 other workers had been able to follow Chauveau and Kaufmann 

 they made an attempt to measure the degree of activity which was 

 induced in terms of absolute units of energy. For this purpose they 

 made measurements both (a) of the work done, by attaching a weight 

 to the muscle, and also (6) of the heat given out by the muscle during 

 its contractions. Nothing in short could have been more complete 

 than the scheme of their research. It has been a loss to science that 

 the actual number of experiments performed was small and that the 

 complete scheme was not carried through in any one experiment. 



The following is an example of the figures which they obtained : 



Extent of Gaseous Exchange in the Leeator Labii Superioris 

 of the horse in c.c. per gram of muscle per minute. 



