448 
POISON OF THE UPAS ANT1AR. 
nerves. The rigor mortis begins early, sometimes in the sixth 
hour, and is generally well established at the eighteenth 
hour. 
Amongst all these symptoms, to which we may add some 
signs of vomiting occurring now and then, there was none 
which attracted 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 ffth to the tenth minute after the 
introduction of the Antiar; and so, that first the venticle 
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 there- 
fore 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 
( f Diss. de Upas Antiar Tubingae, 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 irri- 
tability of the muscles and nerves, are only the results of 
the paralysis 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 (Muller’s ‘Archiv/ 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 dependent on the paralysis of the heart 
caused by it. With reference to the irritability of the 
