MEDICAMENTS AND LIFE. 21% 
effective upon man in that manner. Narceine puts animals 
to sleep more readily than morphine, while the reverse is 
the case with us; yet the former, though less powerful 
than the latter as to the soothing of pain and the produc- 
tion of sleep, seems to be preferred with good reason in 
therapeutics. Narceine, in a dose of twenty-five centi- 
grammes, induces a calm and refreshing sleep, followed by 
an awakening after which none of the troubles are experi- 
enced which follow the administration of morphine, such as 
weariness and nausea. It should be preferred also as a 
remedy for pain, since, in neutralizing pain in patients, it 
produces in them a most desirable condition of comfort; 
nothing is better for neuralgia, for instance. Narceine and 
morphine have, moreover, a property which explains the 
well-known effects of opium in intestinal discharges. 
These labors present another proof of the benefit thera- 
peutics gains from chemistry, and of the fixed connection 
there is between the improvement of one and the advance 
of the other. So long as opium was a mystery for chem- 
ists, it was one for doctors too. The moment the substance 
of that complex drug was decomposed into a certain num- 
ber of well-defined principles, and the nature of their 
blending was ascertained exactly, that moment it became 
possible to decompose not merely the substance, but the 
physiological force of opium, and to reduce it to a small 
number of distinct potencies. Now, thanks to the labors 
of Bernard and Rabuteau, physicians can arrive at an un- 
derstanding of the mode in which ancient therapeutics 
felt its way as to the use of opiates, and they are able for 
the future to act with precision on this or that function, by 
prescribing this or that pure alkaloid whose properties are 
known. 
By uniting with the influence of narceine or morphine 
that of chloroform, we produce new and very curious 
phenomena. Bernard had already observed that insensi- 
