THE PHENOMENON OF CONTRACTION. 23 



The Irritability and Contractility of Muscle. Under normal 

 conditions in the body a muscle is made to contract by a stimulus 

 received from the central nervous system through its motor nerve. 

 If the latter is severed the muscle is paralyzed. We owe to Haller, 

 the great physiologist of the eighteenth century, the proof that 

 a muscle thus isolated can still be made to contract by an artificial 

 stimulus e. g., an electrical shock applied directly to it. This 

 significant discovery removed from physiology the old and harmful 

 idea of animal spirits, which w^ere supposed to be generated in the 

 central nervous system and to cause the swelling of a muscle during 

 contraction by flowing to it along the connecting nerve. But to 

 remove a muscle from the body and make it contract by an artificial 

 stimulus does not prove that the muscle substance itself is capable 

 of being acted upon by the stimulus, since in such an experiment 

 the endings of the nerve in the muscle are still intact, and it may 

 be that the stimulus acts only on them and thus affects the mus- 

 cle indirectly. In a number of ways, however, physiologists have 

 found that the muscle substance can be made to contract by a 

 stimulus applied directly to it, and therefore exhibits what is 

 known as independent irritability. The term irritability, according 

 to modern usage, means that a tissue can be made to exhibit its 

 peculiar form of functional activity when stimulated, e. g., a 

 muscle cell will contract, a gland cell will secrete, etc., and inde- 

 pendent irritability in the case under consideration means simply 

 that the muscle gives its reaction of contraction when artificial 

 stimuli are applied directly to its substance. This conception 

 of irritability was first introduced by Francis Glisson (1597-1677), 

 a celebrated English physician.* Subsequent writers frequently 

 used the term as synonymous with contractility and as applicable 

 only to the muscle. But it is now used for all living tissues in 

 the sense here indicated. A simple proof of the independent 

 irritability of a striated muscle is obtained by cutting the motor 

 nerve going to it and stimulating the muscle after several days. 

 We know now that in the course of several days the severed nerve 

 fibers degenerate completely down to their terminations in the 

 muscle fibers, and the muscle, thus freed from its nerve fibers by 

 the process of degeneration, can still be made to contract by an 

 artificial stimulus. The classical proof of the independent irri- 

 tability of muscle fibers was given by Claude Bernard, the great 

 French physiologist of the nineteenth century. He made use 

 of the so-called arrow poison of the South American Indians. 

 This substance or mixture of substances is known generally under 

 the name curare; it is prepared from the juices of several plants 

 (strychnos) (Thorpe) . The poisonous part of the material is soluble 

 * See Foster's "History of Physiology," p. 287. 



