Am.  Jour.  Pharm. ) 
Nov.,  1921.  f 
The  Power  of  the  Heart. 
791 
rise  to  sulphurous  acid  which  acts  as  an  irritant  in  the  bowel.  In 
contrast  with  this  is  the  finding  of  hydrogen  sulphid  in  the  lower 
small  intestine  and  upper  large  bowel  after  ingestion  of  sulphur. 
The  most  recent  investigator  van  der  Willigen  has  adopted  the  hy- 
pothesis of  the  function  of  the  sydrone  sulphid  as  the  potent  fac- 
tor. He  thus  pictures  its  action:  Ordinarily  the  chyme  which  dis- 
charges from  the  small  intestine  into  the  colon  is  soon  concentrated 
there  by  the  rapid  absorption  of  water;  but  when  hydrogen  sulphid 
is  formed  in  considerable  abundance  from  ingested  sulphur  it  pro- 
vokes a  more  rapid  passage  of  the  semi-fluid  contents  beyond  the 
colon  so  that  the  usual  concentration  cannot  take  place..  A  corres- 
ponding change  in  the  feces  is  observed  along  with  the  more  rapid 
evacuation. 
THE  POWER  OF  THE  HEART. 
A  writer  in  the  Scientific  American  has  been  doing  some  fig- 
uring as  to  the  horse-power — he  does  not  use  this  expression — of 
the  human  heart  and  he  evolves  some  statistics  which  while  of  no 
practical  importance,  are  interesting.  Within  each  human  breast,  he 
says,  this  energetic  organ  is  beating,  on  an  average,  about  seventy- 
five  times  a  minute,  or  4500  times  an  hour.  Accordingly,  the  heart 
beats,  approximately  108,000  times  daily,  39,000,000  times  yearly, 
and,  during  a  lifetime  of  three-score  and  ten  years,  two  billion  seven 
hundred  million  times.  If  we  estimate  the  population  of  our  world 
at  1,700,000,000  people,  then  all  the  human  hearts  on  our  terrestrial 
planet  are  beating  at  the  rate  of,  approximately,  127,000,000,000 
times  a  minute,  or  66  quadrillion  times  a  year.  That  is  to  say, 
these  1,700,000,000  human  hearts  are  throbbing  at  a  rate  of  about 
2  billion  times  a  second. 
As  we  well  know,  our  heart-engine  contains  four  compart- 
ments, two  auricles  and  two  ventricles.  The  auricles  are  reservoirs 
which  supply  the  pumping  ventricles,  with  blood.  Therefore,  the 
dynamic  energy  of  the  human  heart  resides  in  the  right  and  the  left 
ventricles.  When  these  ventricles  contract,  the  right  ventricle  sends 
its  supply  of  impure  blood  to  be  purified  by  the  oxygen  in  the 
lungs,  and  the  left  ventricle  forces  it  supply  of  purified  blood  to 
circulate  in  the  body.  When  the  "heart  beats,"  that  is,  when  the  right 
and  left  ventricles  beat  an  average  of  about  10  cubic  inches  of  blood 
