AN INSTANCE OF THE APPARENT ANTITOXIC ACTION 



OF SALTS * 



Percy Goldthwait Stiles and Carl Spencer Millie en. 



(From the Physiological Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Biological Depart- 



ment of Ripon College.) 



The idea that certain salts may neutralize toxic properties of 

 other salts so that a suitably proportioned mixture may be harmless 

 to living protoplasm though its constituents are individually harmful, 

 is one which we owe especially to Loeb' and Mathews.* There 

 is much evidence favoring such a conception. The observations 

 of Loeb upon the abnormal behavior of skeletal muscles in sodium- 

 chloride solutions and upon the failure of fish embryos to develop 

 in solutions of this single salt are likely to be ranked as classic. He 

 found that the muscles no longer twitched when certain salts, notably 

 those of calcium and potassium, had been added to the bath, and 

 that the embryos prospered when similar corrective additions to 

 the medium had been made. 



These instances no longer stand alone, for they have been repeat- 

 edly paralleled ;3 but the cases first described remain fair types 

 of the class. Whether we do well to use the terms "toxic" and 

 "antitoxic" in this connection may be questioned, and depends 

 upon what theory we adopt to account for the facts. The termi- 

 nology has been criticised by Howell,-* and recently by Osborne.'' 

 When it is said that a certain salt by itself is toxic, the meaning 

 seems often to be merely that it is insufficient, and to say that a 

 second salt is antitoxic to the first implies little more than the thought 

 that it supplies some need of the tissue not met by the other. But 

 we may keep the picturesque and convenient expressions without 

 being dogmatic as regards their application. 



In a recent paper*^ the authors dealt with the action of lithium 

 upon skeletal muscle. The experiments recorded at that time gave 

 ground for the belief that lithium-chloride solutions are among 

 the least harmful to which the muscle may be exposed, and that 

 such solutions preserve the tissue very nearly as well as the usual 



♦Received for publication December 14, 1905. 



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