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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 with 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 (Miiller's Archiv, 1847) ; viz. by cutting out the 

 heart, or by putting a ligature around the base of it, so as to stop the 

 circulation totally. The results of these experiments were in both 

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

 from 30 to 60 minutes, and the reflex movements after one or two 

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

 with Antiar are simply dependent on the paralysis of the heart caused 

 by it. With reference to the irritability of the muscles and nerves, 

 on the contrary, it is easy to show that the ligature or excision of the 

 heart has not the same influence as the Antiar ; inasmuch as in the 

 first case the muscles and nerves are found irritable six or seven 

 hours, and more, after the experiment has been made. Therefore it 

 may be said that the Antiar has a direct action on these organs. 



These points once demonstrated, there remained one more question 

 to elucidate, namely, whether the Antiar acts only upon the mus- 

 cles, or also upon the nerves. If we consider that the Antiar un- 



