PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECT.—Applied locally, cocaine greatly lessens and even annihilates pain. Taken internally, it acts as a powerful stimulant to the nervous system, its physiological action being similar to that of theine (p. 170), caffeine, and theobromine. Used hypodermically, its immediate effect, says one to whom it was thus administered, is to cause "great pallor of countenance, profuse frontal perspiration, sunken eyes, enlarged pupils, lessened sensitiveness of the cornea and conjunctiva, lowered arterial tension, and a feeble pulse and heart beat. Under its influence I could not reason. Everything seemed to run through my brain, and in vain I summoned all my will power to overcome an overwhelming sleepiness." A few doses of this drug will in some persons produce temporary insanity. Used to excess, it leads to permanent madness or idiocy. "Cocaine," says a writer in the Medical Review, "is a dangerous therapeutic toy not to be used as a sensational plaything. If it should come into as general use as the other intoxicants of its class, it will help to fill the asylums, inebriate and insane."
PRACTICAL QUESTIONS.
1. Why is the pain of incipient hip disease frequently felt in the knee?
2. Why does a child require more sleep than an aged person?
3. When you put your finger in the palm of a sleeping child, why will he grasp it?
4. How may we strengthen the brain?
5. What is the object of pain?
6. Why will a blow on the stomach sometimes stop the heart?
7. How long will it take for the brain of a man six feet high to receive news of an injury to his foot, and to reply?
8. How can we grow beautiful?