24 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



A communication from the Royal Society of Northern An- 

 tiquaries in Copenhagen, containing circulars relating to the 

 collection of materials for works upon the history of the Old 

 Northern Literature, was laid before the Academy. 



Dr. William P. Dexter was elected a Fellow of the Academy. 



M. Brown Lequard, of Paris, personally made the following 

 communication. 



He stated that he had succeeded in producing muscular ir- 

 ritability, i. e. life in the muscles, after decomposition had 

 commenced, by means of injections of blood, repeated every 

 two or three hours. But the fact of which he wished to 

 speak this evening was quite different. He had found that 

 muscles separated from the body might be maintained in a 

 state of rigidity by the injection of chloroform. After an in- 

 terval of several days, blood might be again introduced, repel- 

 ling the chloroform, and reinducing the irritability of the 

 muscles. In one case, after the lapse of ten days, muscular 

 life had been restored by the injection of blood, though the 

 amount of blood required was much greater than after a 

 smaller interval. Irritability might also sometimes be intro- 

 troduced, though more rarely. 



In reply to a question of Dr. Pickering, M. Lequard stated 

 that the blood must be as fresh as possible, though it was ca- 

 pable of producing the effect when an hour old. In one case 

 in Paris, he had found that blood which had been drawn for 

 two hours had sufficed. 



With regard to the proper kind of blood for transfusion, he 

 had found that fibrine was not necessary, so that the operation 

 can be performed with defibrinated blood. Bischoff had dis- 

 covered, that, in those cases where the blood of one animal 

 was poison to another, this quality was due solely to the 

 fibrine, so that defibrinated blood may be used in all cases for 

 transfusion without deleterious results. There is another in- 



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teresting fact, namely, that animals have more fibrine in their 

 blood when they have not been fed for a long time, than 

 under ordinary circumstances. 



