[363] In an experiment of Dragendorff’s, nicotine is said to have been detected in 35 grms. of the saliva of a person who had half an hour previously smoked a cigar.
3. PITURIE.[364]
[364] See “The Alkaloid from Piturie,” by Prof. Leversidge, Chem. News, March 18 and 25, 1881.
§ 338. Piturie (C6H8N) is a liquid, nicotine-like alkaloid, obtained from the Duboisia hopwoodii, a small shrub or tree belonging to the natural order Solanaceæ, indigenous in Australia. The natives mix piturie leaves with ashes from some other plant, and chew them. Piturie is obtained by extracting the plant with boiling water acidified with sulphuric acid, concentrating the liquid by evaporation, and then alkalising and distilling with caustic soda, and receiving the distillate in hydrochloric acid. The solution of the hydrochlorate is afterwards alkalised and shaken up with ether, which readily dissolves out the piturie. The ether solution of piturie is evaporated to dryness in a current of hydrogen, and the crude piturie purified by distillation in hydrogen, or by changing it into its salts, and again recovering, &c. It is clear and colourless when pure and fresh, but becomes yellow or brown when exposed to air and light. It boils and distils at 243° to 244°. It is soluble in all proportions in alcohol, water, and ether; its taste is acrid and pungent; it is volatile at ordinary temperatures, causing white fumes with hydrochloric acid; it is very irritating to the mucous membranes, having a smell like nicotine at first, and then, when it becomes browner, like pyridine. It forms salts with acids, but the acetate, sulphate, and hydrochlorate are varnish-like films having no trace of crystallisation; the oxalate is a crystalline salt. Piturie gives precipitates with mercuric chloride, cupric sulphate, gold chloride, mercur-potassic iodide, tannin, and an alcoholic solution of iodine. If an ethereal solution of iodine is added to an ethereal solution of piturie, a precipitate of yellowish-red needles, readily soluble in alcohol, is deposited. The iodine compound melts at 110°, while the iodine compound of nicotine melts at 100°. Piturie is distinguished from coniine by its aqueous solution not becoming turbid either on heating or on the addition of chlorine water; it differs from picoline in specific gravity, picoline being ·9613 specific gravity at 0°, and piturie sinking in water; it differs from aniline by not being coloured by chlorinated lime. From nicotine it has several distinguishing marks, one of the best being that it does not change colour on warming with hydrochloric acid and the addition to the mixture afterwards of a little nitric acid. The physiological action seems to be but little different from that of nicotine. It is, of course, poisonous, but as yet has no forensic importance.
4. SPARTEINE.
§ 339. In 1851 Stenhouse[365] separated a poisonous volatile alkaloid from Spartium scoparium, the common broom, to which he gave the name of sparteine. At the same time a crystalline non-poisonous substance, scoparin, was discovered.