2. To the last add 2 table-spoonfuls of yeast.
Cakes, Tip′sy. Prep. Small sponge cakes steeped in brandy, and then covered with grated almonds and candied peel; or almonds (cut into spikes) are stuck in them. They are commonly piled on a dish, surrounded with a custard, and covered with preserves drained as dry as possible.
Cakes, Wigg. Prep. From 1⁄2 pint of warm milk; 3⁄4 lb. of fine flour; and 2 or 3 spoonfuls of light yeast. Afterwards work in 4 oz. each of sugar and butter; make it into cakes, or wiggs, with as little flour as possible, add a few caraway seeds, and bake them quickly.
Cakes. (In medicine.) Cakes have been used as a form of administering medicinal substances to children, but have not been extensively employed in this country for the purpose, unless by quacks and in domestic practice. In preparing them the active ingredients are added in such proportions to the common materials of a sweet cake that one or two, as the case may be, are sufficient for a dose. See Gingerbread, Worm-cakes, &c.
CALA′BAR BEAN. Syn. Physostigmatis Faba. The seed of Physostigma venenosum. The plant is a native of Western Africa, where the bean is used as an ordeal poison. The bean itself is about the size of a large horse-bean, with a very firm, hard, brittle, shining coat of a brownish-red, pale chocolate, or ash-grey colour. It has an irregular kidney shape, with flat surfaces and a rounded border, which is for the most part boldly curved, and there marked with a broad furrow, with the central raised raphe in the centre, and ending at one extremity in the microphyle. The kernel consists of two cotyledons. It yields its properties to alcohol, and imperfectly to water. Calabar bean has been used in cases of strychnia poisoning and tetanus, as well as in epilepsy and St. Vitus’s dance. The dose of the powdered bean, according to Royle, is one to four grains. Locally applied it produces contraction of the pupil.
Until the researches of Harnack and Witkowsky the Calabar bean was supposed to owe its activity, when internally administered, to the presence of a powerful alkaloid called esernia or physostigma. These chemists, however, have lately succeeded in discovering in the bean, in addition to eserina, another very potent alkaloid, to which they have given the name calabaria or calabarine.
Calabarine appears to exert a physiological action antagonistic to that of eserine, and since the commercial preparations of the drug consist, according to the above chemists, of mixtures of the two alkaloids in varying proportions, the discordant effects frequently observed to follow the administration of any of the various preparations of the bean, admit of ready explanation. Wherever eserine predominated it appeared to suppress the effects of calabarine; on the other hand, if this latter preponderated, the paralysing effect on the spinal cord otherwise exercised by eserine would fail to be produced.
The necessity of having preparations of calabar free from calabarine, in cases where the drug is administered for tetanus, will be apparent when it is stated that calabarine itself induces the disease.
We quote the following from ‘New Remedies’ for June, 1877:—
“The well-known manufacturing chemist, E. Merk, in Darmstadt, has heretofore prepared and sold a substance which was supposed to be the only active principle of calabar, and which he called calabarine, but which was really eserine or physostigmine. He now accepts and confirms the results of Harnack’s and Witkowsky’s researches, and has put both of the active principles upon the market labelled with their correct name, viz. ‘Physostigmin’ (or eserine, being the same substance which he formerly sold as calabarine), and ‘Calabarin,’ distinguished by the addition of Harnack’s name (Harnack’s ‘Calabarine’). The attention of physicians and pharmacists is particularly directed to the change of appellations.”