552 ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 



salts of potash, which favor digestion and circulation. Third, 

 in stronger doses, instead of being useful, they may have an 

 injurious influence ; administered at the end of long sickness, 

 when the economy of the system is exhausted by prolonged 

 abstinence, the salts of potash may have an injurious effect, 

 manifest in proportion as the system has lost all its chloride 

 of sodium. Far from favoring nutrition, they interfere with 

 it by the direct action of these potash salts upon the globule 

 which produces the least absorption of oxygen, and by the 

 predominance in the serum of salts which only dissolve car- 

 bonic acid physically, and do not permit the exhalation of 

 the normal quantity of this gas, and, consequently, the intro- 

 duction of oxygen. Fourth, the physician should always bear 

 in mind that to give these extracts alone is to maintain the 

 patient in a condition of inanition. 4 J5, September, 1871, 626. 



PHYSIOLOGICAL PROPERTIES OF OPIUM ALKALOIDS. 



Rabuteau has lately prosecuted a careful inquiry into the 

 physiological properties of the different alkaloids of opium, 

 some experiments having been made upon the human subject, 

 both sick and in health, and others upon dogs, mice, and 

 frogs. They were given both by the mouth and in the form 

 of hypodermic injections. The substances investigated were 

 thebaine, papaverine, narcotine, codeine, narceine, morphine, 

 meconic acid, and meconine. 



He found that they could be arranged in the following or- 

 der as regards their various effects upon man : first, as sopo- 

 rific agents morphine, narceine, codeine (the others do not 

 produce sleep) ; second, as poisonous agents morphine, co- 

 deine, thebaine, papaverine, narceine, narcotine ; third, as an- 

 algesic agents, or quieters of pain narceine, morphine,, the- 

 baine, papaverine, codeine (narcotine does not seem to enter 

 into this series at all) ; fourth, anexosmotic agents, or antag- 

 onists to diarrhoea morphine and narceine, these alone hav- 

 ing this peculiarity. 



It is well known that the combined action of morphine and 

 chloroform produces analgesia without the necessity of caus- 

 ing slumber. In the case of a dog which had received a hy- 

 podermic injection of three quarters of a grain of chlorohy- 

 drate of narceine, and which had been subsequently put to 

 sleep by chloroform, no sensation of pain appeared to be felt 



