ITS PASSIVE FUNCTIONS. 39 



I did not perceive any of these phenomena when I introduced 

 fresh human saliva into the stomach of a dog, through a fistulous 

 opening, but I certainly did not employ more than two ounces at 

 most; six ounces of the parotid saliva of a horse were,however, equally 

 well retained by the dog. Nor can any conclusions be deduced 

 from vomiting in dogs, since they vomit on the slightest provo- 

 cation, and frequently devour what they have thrown up without 

 experiencing any bad effect from it. The quantity of saliva which 

 was used by Wright, and which could not have been very speedily 

 collected, leads us to suspect that his "normal saliva 55 was already 

 undergoing decomposition, and consequently gave rise to these 

 abnormal phenomena. 



Wright also distinguishes several passive functions of the 

 saliva; (a) it assists the sense of taste; (b) it favours the expres- 

 sion of the voice; (c) it clears the mucous membrane of the 

 mouth, and moderates thirst. 



We must not omit to mention, at the close of these remarks 

 on the saliva, that Wright believes he has confirmed, by his ex- 

 periments of injecting the saliva of animals into the blood, the 

 ancient opinion, which, however, is still maintained by Eberle* and 

 Hiinefeld,t that the saliva of enraged animals, or of men in a violent 

 fit of anger, is capable of inducing a number of highly suspicious, 

 morbid symptoms, and more especially hydrophobia, when intro- 

 duced into the blood. In the experiments made by Prinz and 

 myself on dogs, with human saliva and the saliva of a horse, and 

 conducted very nearly in the same manner as Wright's, excepting 

 that we employed only filtered saliva, we never observed any 

 symptoms of hydrophobia, even in dogs that suffered from the 

 experiment, nor did we recognize, in the dissection of these 

 animals, any of the pathologico-anatomical phenomena (as, for 

 instance, in the stomach) which are usually met with in the post 

 mortem examination of mad dogs. JacubowitschJ has also de- 

 voted the most careful attention to this subject, and instituted 

 very accurate experiments, which not only refute Wright's state- 

 ments, but expose at the same time the grounds that had led to 

 the erroneous views arising from these experiments. The results 

 cf Jacubowitsch's experiments are as follows : human saliva does 

 not give rise to any morbid symptoms, even when introduced in 

 large quantities into the stomachs of dogs : unfiltered saliva pro- 



* Physiol. der Verdauung. Wurzburg, 1834, S. 28. 

 f Chemie u. Medicin. S. 52. 

 t Op. cit. pp. 42-47. 



