806 



periodide, sublimate, and picric acid. In acetone the substance appeared 

 to be insoluble. It now turned out that the extracts thus purified, 

 did not only act upon the surviving small intestine, but also upon 

 the intact animal. Weiland's RöNTGEN-tests showed that a potent 

 positive influence was exerted on the movements of the stomach and 

 of the small intestine in intact cats and rabbits. The essential in- 

 fluence this substance (or these substances) seemed to have in origin- 

 ating the movement of the small intestine rendered further investiga- 

 tion necessary. Prof. Magnus now suggested to me to endeavour to 

 abstract the active constituent of these extracts in a pure condition 

 and to determine the chemical structure. The present paper is a 

 provisional report of this inquiry. 



Initially I prepared the extracts from the small intestines of a cat 

 and proceeded as follows: 



The cat was profoundly anaesthetized under the bell and killed 

 by a blow on the neck, the small intestine was removed from the 

 animal and put in a dish with warmed Tyrode solution, washed 

 out twice with this liquid, each time transferred to a fresh solution, 

 and at last it was irrigated by a powerful jet of water. Subsequently 

 the gut was tied up on both ends, and put in about 100 c.c. of 

 distilled water of 38°; only the ends of the gut did not touch the 

 water. After an hour the gut was taken out, the slightly opalescent 

 but slightly coloured fluid was boiled up on a copper gauze, evap- 

 orated down to a volume of 30 c.c, filtered, and the filtrate was 

 then evaporated to dryness in a porcelain dish on the waterbath. 

 The brown residue was subsequently extracted with absolute alcohol, 

 the alcoholic solution was filtered and evaporated to dryness, the 

 remainder was extracted with ether. After filtration the ether was 

 evaporated and the residue was taken up in water. 



The extracts prepared and purified in this way proved (though 

 not always) to include the looked for active constituent. During our 

 inquiry, however, it appeared that in using more material the alcohol 

 abstracts the active substance only slowly and partially from the 

 tough residue of the aqueous extract. We, therefore, evaporated the 

 residue to dryness on purified quartz-sand and extracted it with 

 alcohol for some time in extracting apparatus. 



From the then obtained dark coloured alcoholic solution the solvent 

 was removed by distilling, the remainder was dried in vacuo over 

 sulphuric acid and after this extracted with a large amount of ether. 

 The difficulty 1 encountered here was that only a portion of the 

 active substance was transmitted to the ether, especially after a 

 preliminary purification with acetone. Also without this a consider- 



