Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/385

Rh in the preparation of curari, and he has had prepared under his own supervision, entirely from vegetal substances, one of the best of American curaris, that of the Tecuna Indians living' on the Calderão, Brazil, near the Peruvian border. Some fine scrapings of Urari uva, a climbing plant of the genus Strychnos, and of the Eko or Pani, of the family Menispermaceæ, also a climber, were steeped in cold water. This liquid was then boiled for six hours, and there were thrown into it fragments of various plants, among them an Aroidea (Taja), and three different species of Piperaceæ. In this way the liquid was made to assume the consistency of mucilage; it was then suffered to cool, and became as thick as shoe-blacking. Dr. Jobert has found by experiment that the Urari and the Taja are the most rapidly fatal in their effects of all the ingredients, and that the Pani, administered by itself, is less rapid.

The Indians use curari to poison their arrows both for hunting and for war. The hunting-arrows, intended to be shot from a bow, have a detachable point; those shot from the sarbacand or blow-gun are very small, and consist of a slender shaft of iron-wood with a very sharp point, which bears the poison. Sometimes the poison is used highly diluted or in very small quantity, so as to produce in the victim simply a numbness, which passes away by degrees, but which in the mean time checks the animal in its course or in its flight, or causes it to fall from the tree in which it may happen to be. It is thus, we are told, that the Indians capture monkeys and parrots for sale to the European traders. Often the animal is killed by the arrow, but nevertheless its flesh may be eaten with impunity, for the very minute dose of the curari which enters the stomach with a mass of food is innocuous. Indeed, we know that curari, like the venom of serpents and the saliva of a rabid dog, may be introduced without injury into the digestive organs, provided the mucous surfaces of the latter are free from all lesion.

Curari has been mixed with the food given to dogs and rabbits in quantity far more than enough to produce fatal poisoning through a wound, and yet the animals have suffered no inconvenience.

Claude Bernard, however, has very clearly shown that this innocuousness of curari when administered through the stomach is relative only. In this respect curari resembles many other substances, both medicines and poisons. The peculiarity of their action is explained by the property which amorphous substances possess of being very slowly absorbed by the mucous membranes. By young mammals and birds while fasting, and while intestinal absorption is very active, curari cannot be taken into the stomach with impunity. We can only say that it takes a much larger quantity of curari to produce poisoning through the digestive organs than through an external wound.

Curari introduced into living tissues produces death all the sooner the more quickly it enters the circulation. Death comes quicker when