Maurice Girard

“ In that motionless body, back of that lack-lustre eye, with all these semblances of death, sensibility and mind still persist intact; what looks to be a dead carcass hears and knows all that goes on around it; it feels pain when its body is pinched or burned ”

“ Death comes quicker when a solution of curari is injected under the skin than when the dry poison is introduced by the point of an arrow. Vigorous animals with rapid circulation of blood are more easily poisoned than those which are weakly; and with an equal dose of poison and with animals of equal size, those whose temperature is constant die more quickly than those whose temperature is variable (reptiles, batrachians, fishes) , and, among the former, birds succumb more quickly than mammals. ”

“ The animal at first does not feel the wound, for curari possesses no caustic property. In the case of very small animals death is almost instantaneous. In birds and mammals of a large size, and in all animals of variable temperature, death usually occurs in from five to twelve minutes, if there is an excess of the poison. The animal lies down as though it would sleep, keeping the eyes open, with a placid expression. Soon it is seized with a progressive paralysis of the motor nerves, proceeding from the extremities to the centre. ”

“ To Claude Bernard science is indebted for the exact determination of the specific action of curari. Vital activity presents a threefold series of distinct and coördinated organic elements, which play the part of excitants of one another. The starting-point of physiological action is the sensitive nerve-element. Its vibration is transmitted along its axis, and on reaching the nerve-cell—a regular relay—the sensory vibration is transformed into a motor vibration. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sometimes curari is prepared openly and without mystery on some high festival of the tribe, with the usual accompaniment of copious libations of strong drink. And, by-the-way, it has been remarked by Humboldt that during a festival it is a rare thing to find a native that is not intoxicated, drunkenness being unfortunately, in all latitudes, the habitual expression of gladness among the ruder classes of mankind. ”

“ It may safely be affirmed that by next century it will have disappeared, either through the annihilation of these races, who are vanishing before the whites, or blending with them by intermarriage, or, above all, because firearms, obtained by way of barter from European traders, are steadily superseding the ancient implements of war and of the chase. ”

“ But, inasmuch as vital manifestations require the coöperation of these three activities, if one be suppressed, the other two continue to live indeed, but they no longer mean anything, just as a phrase loses its meaning if one of its members be dropped out. ”

“ This latter, in turn, is propagated through the motor nerve-element, and on reaching its peripheric extremity causes the fibre of the muscle to vibrate, and this, reacting in virtue of its essential property, produces contraction, and consequently motion.
Now, each of the three elements, sensory, motor, and muscular, lives and dies after a fashion of its own, and there are poisons proper to each. ”

“ 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. ”