
216. : "NATURE AND LIFE. 
: Gov erned by. hese: ideas, Bernard has studied the 
various active principles contained in opium, as regards 
their comparative ‘influence | oyer the animal functions, and 
has ascertained | that they. exhibit properties not a 
differing from, but opposed to, each other. He has made 
more than two hundred experiments with morphine, nar- 
ceine, codeine, narcotine, papaverine, and thebaine. These 
examinations have proved that, among these six principles, 
only three produce sleep; these are, morphine, narceine, 
and codeine. The three others have no soporific effect ; 
they possess a power, either stimulating or toxic, which 
rather tends to thwart or to modify the narcotic effect of 
the former three. In the scale of their power to produce 
sleep, narceine holds the first grade, morphine the second, 
and codeine the third. As stimulants, thebaine has more 
power than narcotine, and the latter more than codeine. 
And last, as to their toxic quality, Bernard arranges them 
in the following order, begining with the most poisonous: 
thebaine, codeine, papaverine, narceine, morphine, narco- 
tine. We see that the author of these investigations has 
not been content with merely describing the differences in 
their action which mark the alkaloids of opium, but that 
he has also measured the degree of intensity with which 
each one of them displays the kind of physiological or the- 
rapeutic activity peculiar to it. 
These studies have been taken up again quite lately, 
by Rabuteau. This experimenter has examined the ac- 
tion of the alkaloids of opium on sensibility and on the in- 
testine, and has made trial of them in a methodical way on 
the human subject, at the hospitals of la Charité and la 
Pitié. . The order in which the various principles of opium 
may be classed, with regard to their activity, is not the 
same in the case of man as it is with animals. Thus 
Rabuteau found that. morphine, which has relatively but 
little toxic power over the latter, is in the highest degree 

