608 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



ing one of these Maudsley (198: 5) says: "The stages in the 

 gradually deepening unconsciousness which is produced by 

 o])ium illustrate very well the gradations in the process of 

 going to sleep: there is first a drowsy feeling which becomes 

 soon an irresistible inclination to sleep; the person then falls 

 into a slumber from which he may be roused sufficiently to 

 make a reply to a question put to him in a loud voice, there- 

 upon sinking back immediately into sleep, which deepens 

 rapidly into a comatose unconsciousness from which the severest 

 pinching, slapping, and irritation of all kinds hardly avail to 

 elicit more than the least sign of feeling or the briefest responsive 

 movement; finally he sinks into so deep a coma that he is in- 

 sensible to anything that may be done to him; all the tortures 

 which savage ever devised and inflicted upon his enemy, or 

 Christian upon his fellow-believer of a minutely different shade 

 of faith, would not touch him — he is in the unconsciousness of 

 death before death. One sense goes to sleep after another, 

 each sinking gradually into a deeper slumber, then the spinal 

 cord and, last of all, the respiratory center in the medulla 

 oblongata cease activity, when the man dies. In the produc- 

 tion of insensibility by the inhalation of chloroform or of ether 

 we observe evidence that the person hears after he can no 

 longer see, and that the senses of taste and smell are lost before 

 those of hearing and touch; and in natural sleep it is obvious 

 that there are similar gradations of unconsciousness, one sense 

 being sometimes more deeply asleep than another, or the spinal 

 cord being awake when the special sensory centers are fast 

 asleep." 



While some poisons like oxalic and prussic acid, bichromate 

 of potash, digitalin, and others are definite simple bodies, 

 others such as snake poisons, curare, and various ptomaine 

 poisons consist of two or more compounds, either alkaloids, 

 glucosides, or unstable proteids. But physiologically some act 

 at once to irritate and then destroy the protoplasmic substance, 

 and so in the human subject these rapidly change the structure 

 of the blood corpuscle, cause irritation and then disintegration 

 in such vegetative parts as the alimentary canal and its associ- 



