LIPOID-ALTERANT SUBSTANCES 195 



than in the medium, and this fact is usually interpreted 

 as favoring the partition theory of narcosis. Pohl^ 

 found that the blood corpuscles and brain of deeply 

 narcotized dogs contained from three to four times as 

 much chloroform as the serum; Hedin^ investigated 

 cryoscopically the distribution of alcohols, aldehydes, 

 ketones, esters, and ether between corpuscles and 

 plasma, and found that most compounds, especially the 

 more highly lipoid-soluble, collected in higher concentra- 

 tion in the cells than in the plasma. More recently 

 Warburg and Wiesel^ have made similar observations on 

 the blood corpuscles of birds, using alcohols, ketones, 

 urethanes, thymol, formaldehyde, and HCN. All of 

 these compounds, in appropriate concentrations, were 

 found to decrease oxygen consumption, and the tendency 

 to concentrate in the cells ran closely parallel with this 

 effect. Thus the lower alcohols (up to butyl alcohol) 

 were the least effective in reducing oxygen consumption, 

 and showed correspondingly a somewhat lower solubility 

 in the protoplasm than in the medium; methyl ure thane, 

 diethyl urea, and acetone behaved similarly; amyl 

 alcohol and isobutyl urethane were more effective, and 

 were about equally distributed between cells and medium; 

 while the most effective substances — phenyl-methyl 

 ketone, thymol, phenyl urethane — ;all showed decided 

 concentration in the cells. When solutions were used 

 that decreased the oxygen consumption by 50 per cent, 

 phenyl-methyl ketone was found to be about twice, 

 phenyl urethane three times, and thymol nine times as 



^ Pohl, Arch, exper. Path. u. Pharmakol., XXVIII (1891), 239. 



^Hedin, Arch. ges. Physiol., LXVIII (1897), 229. 



3 Warburg and Wiesel, Arch. ges. Physiol., CXLIV (191 2), 465. 



