Prof. KoUiker on the Poison of the Upas Antiar. ] 41 



the ventricle to shrink a little more, and to become pale and stiff, as 

 if in the state of rigor mortis. All interior organs, especially the 

 lungs, liver, stomach, intestine, and kidneys, are gorged with blood, 

 and in a state of great, especially venous, hyperaemia. The blood 

 is fluid and rather dark, but soon coagulates when exposed to the 

 air, and assumes a brighter colour. The lymphatic hearts cease to 

 beat as soon as the reflex movements are lost. At the same time 

 the nerves are yet found excitable, but their power is very low, and 

 generally vanishes in the second hour after the application of the 

 poison. The same must be said of the muscles, which contract 

 very feebly when directly stimulated by galvanism, and in most 

 cases lose their power totally in the second or third hour, and gene- 

 rally a little after their nerves. The rigor mortis begins early, 

 sometimes in the sixth hour, and is generally well established at 

 the eighteenth hour. 



Amongst all these symptoms, to which we may add some signs of 

 vomiting occurring now and then, there was none which attracted 

 my attention more than the cessation of the movements of the heart, 

 considering the great energy which this organ possesses in frogs ; 

 and I tried, therefore, before all, to elucidate the action of the 

 Antiar upon the heart. For this purpose I instituted a new 

 series of experiments, in which I exposed the heart by the section 

 of the sternum, before the poison was introduced into a wound of 

 the back ; and in this way I easily got the result, that the heart 

 ceases to beat as soon as from, the fifth to the tenth minute after 

 the introduction of the Antiar ; and so, that first the ventricle stops, 

 and half a minute or one minute later, also the auricles. Now, as 

 the frogs at this time are not at all deprived of their faculty to 

 move, we may have the rather astonishing view of an animal, with 

 artificially-paralysed heart, which moves and leaps as freely as if 

 nothing had happened. 



The experiments just mentioned prove, that the first action of the 

 Upas Antiar is to paralyse the heart ; and I am therefore quite in 

 accordance ^vith Sir Benjamin Brodie, who, by his experiments on 

 mammalia, came to the same result in 1812; whilst I cannot otherwise 

 than disagree with Schnell (Diss, de Upas Antiar, Tubingae, 1815), 

 who assumes that this poison acts in the first place on the spinal 

 marrow. Now this point fixed, the further question arises, whether 

 the other symptoms mentioned, viz. the paralysis of the voluntary 

 and reflex movements, and the loss of the irritability of the mus- 

 cles and nerves, are only the results of the paralysis of the heart, 

 or must be attributed to a specific action of the Antiar. For the 

 elucidation of this question, I found it necessary to study the con- 

 sequences of the suppression of the heart's action on the organism 

 of frogs, which I did in the same way as it had been done by others, 

 especially by Kuude (Midler's Archiv, 1847) ; viz. by cutting out the 

 heart, or by j)utting a ligature around the base of it, so as to sto]) the 

 circulation totally. The results of these experiments were in both 

 cases the same, that is to say, the voluntary movements ceased iu 

 from 30 to GO minutes, and the reflex movements after one or two 

 hours. Hence it follows that these two symptoms of the poisoning 



