OCTOBEE 6, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



423 



stance which corresponds to the chemical 

 constitution and action of the poison. 

 With a similar idea in mind Oscar Loew, 

 twenty years ago, considered himself justi- 

 fied in assuming the presence of an alde- 

 hyde group in the living protoplasm, basing 

 this view on a series of merely qualitative 

 toxic reactions like those obtainable by hy- 

 droxylamine, diamid and other substances. 

 An example of another pharmacological 

 method which may, perhaps, prove of util- 

 ity is the investigation of the narcotics. 

 The quantitative comparison of the action 

 of aliphatic narcotics (alcohol, ether, chlo- 

 roform, etc.) leads to what I believe, to be 

 the unavoidable conclusion that certain fat- 

 like substances like lecithin must be con- 

 ceived as constituting integral parts of the 

 'Leistungskern. ' It happens that one can 

 compare with considerable exactitude in a 

 quantitative way, the efficacy of this nu- 

 merous group of bodies. This comparison 

 has brought out the fact that the degree of 

 activity is approximately proportional to 

 the individual chemico-physical affinities of 

 all these substances, that is their solution- 

 tensions for fat-like bodies compared with 

 their solution-tensions for watery media. 

 From this almost rigid parallelism it fol- 

 lows with a high degree of probability that 

 in the union of ether, chloroform, etc., to a 

 fat-like substance — a lipoid — we have the 

 origin of the narcosis of the cell; in other 

 words, the lipoid belongs to the essential 

 functionally active constituents of the cell. 

 It has been urged against this conclusion 

 that the cell lipoids occasion merely a 

 stronger or a weaker accumulation of the 

 narcotic which then acts on the true al- 

 buminoid life-center of the cell in propor- 

 tion to the degree of this accumulation. 

 There are, in reality, only tM^o possibilities. 

 First, one may assume that the narcotic 

 operates only through its presence in life- 

 less lipoids whence it acts from a distance, 

 perhaps through a sort of induction, upon 



the living cell-center itself, without enter- 

 ing into reciprocal chemical action with its 

 center. Such a view could be neither re- 

 futed nor established. But in order to ex- 

 plain the above-mentioned parallelism, it 

 would be necessary, on this supposition, to 

 invoke the aid of the very improbable hy- 

 pothesis that all the different narcotic sub- 

 stances, compared on an equimolecular 

 basis, exert an equally strong induction. 

 And this hypothesis wholly fails to allow 

 for the dift'erent influence of special groups 

 of atoms, as, for example, the ethyl group, 

 the methyl group, etc. Hence it is clear 

 that such an action at a distance must re- 

 main problematical, and furnishes us no 

 actual explanation. On the other hand, 

 we may make the much more likely assump- 

 tion that the narcotic substance enters into 

 a reciprocal, reversible, chemico-physical 

 action with some constituent of the 'Leis- 

 tungskern' or 'life-center,' the strength of 

 which reaction is dependent on the inten- 

 sity of this reciprocal action. Then again, 

 the law of mass action here comes into play, 

 that is the law of distribution. We may 

 even leave the lipoid for the moment out 

 of account. In this case it would have to 

 be regarded simply as an intermediary 

 solvent and would remain without influence 

 upon the equilibrium established by the 

 narcotic between the blood and lymph 

 plasma on the one hand and the ' Leistungs- 

 kern' or 'life-center' on the other. Ex- 

 periment, however, showed that the affinity 

 of the living cell substance for a narcotic, 

 measured by the observed intensity of 

 action, runs parallel to the experimentally 

 obse,rved fat affinity of the narcotic, or, in 

 other words, that the unknown constituent 

 of the living cell or ' Leistungskern ' must 

 itself possess certain properties of a fatty 

 substance, or, in short, must itself be a fat- 

 like or lipoid body. And thus we come 

 back to the very conclusion of which I 

 have already spoken. I have expressed 



