April — sept. 1858.] Poison of the Upas Antiar. 101 



ed my attention, more than the cessation of the movements of the 

 heart, considering the great energy which this organ possesses in 

 frogs, and I tried, therefore, before all, to elucidate the action of 

 the Antiar upon the heart. For this purpose I instituted a new- 

 series of experiments, in which I exposed the heart by the section 

 of the sternum, before the poison was introduced into a wound of 

 the back, and in this way I easily got the result, that the heart 

 ceases to beat as soon as from the fifth to the tenth minute after 

 the introduction of the Antiar, and so, that first the ventricle stops, 

 and half a minute or one minute later, also the auricles. Now, as 

 the frogs at this time are not at all deprived of their faculty to 

 move, we may have the rather astonishing view of an animal, with 

 artificially paralysed heart, which moves and leaps as freely as if 

 nothing had happened. 



The experiments just mentioned prove, that the first action of 

 the Upas Antiar is to paralyse the heart, and I am therefore quite 

 in accordance with Sir Benjamin Brodie, who, by his experiments 

 on Mammalia, came to the same result in 1812, whilst I cannot 

 otherwise than disagree with Schnell (Diss, de Upas Antiar, Tu- 

 bingse, 1815), who assumes that this poison acts in the first place 

 on the spinal marrow. Now this point fixed, the further question 

 arises, whether the other symptoms mentioned, viz., the paralysis 

 of the voluntary and reflex movements, and the loss of the irrita- 

 bility of the muscles and nerves are only the results of the para- 

 lysis of the heart, or must be attributed to a specific action of the 

 Antiar, For the elucidation of this question, I found it necessary 

 to study the consequences of the suppression of the heart's action 

 on the organism of frogs, which I did in the same way as it had 

 been done by others, especially by Kunde Miiller's Archive (1847), 

 viz., by cutting out the heart, or by putting a ligature around the 

 base of it, so as to stop the circulation totally. The results of 

 these experiments were in both cases the same, that is to say, the 

 voluntary movements ceased in from 30 to 60 minutes, and the 

 reflex movements after one or two hours. Hence it follows that 

 these two symptoms of the poisoning with Antiar are simply de- 

 pendent on the paralysis of the heart caused by it. With refer- 



