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need more time to reach their corner. My goats needed 7 to 20 

 seconds instead of 2 or 3. Under standard conditions, the experi- 

 ment yields for one and the same animal surprisingly reproducible 

 results, the running time differing on various days by no more 

 than to 3 seconds. 



Another circumstance which adds to the attractions of myotonia 

 is that the symptoms of this disease can faithfully be reproduced 

 by the administration of a drug, 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, 

 commonly called 2,4D. Bucher has discovered that this drug pro- 

 duces myotonic symptoms in laboratory animals such as mice and 

 rats. Eyzaguirre, Folk, Zierler, and Lilienthal showed that the 

 electric behavior of muscle in 2,4D poisoning is similar to that of 

 myotonic muscle, single electric shocks being answered by the 

 firing of a train of waves of excitation. This possibility of repro- 

 ducing a degenerative disease by means of a drug is most interest- 

 ing. What lends additional fascination is the fact that 2,4D is 

 also known as a powerful growth hormone for plants and is widely 

 used as a weed killer, showing the basic unity of the principles on 

 which the animal and vegetable world are built. 



When trying to connect myotonia with £* one could start with 

 trying to show that 2,4D does something to £* and does it in the 

 same concentration as it elicits myotonic symptoms in the animal. 

 Such a demonstration would bring the possibility closer that hered- 

 itary myotonia also is, essentially, a disturbance of £*, related in 

 its nature to the disturbance caused by the drug. According to the 

 earlier workers 300 mg of 2,4D per kilogram ingested parenterally 

 to rats is lethal, while 200 mg causes grave myotonic symptoms. 

 The author repeated these experiments in Swiss albino mice and 

 corroborated them. His results are summed up in Table IV. The 

 table also shows the COi.. production. The methods used here were 

 the same as the ones used in the study of chlorpromazine. As can 

 be seen, the myotonic symptoms were accompanied by a drop in 

 the basal metabolic rate depressed by 200 mg to about one-third 

 of its normal value; 250 mg per kilogram depressed it to one- 



