[1685]. Procès de Castaing, p. 113.
[1686]. Ann. de Chim. et de Phys. xxv. 102.
[1687]. Toxicol. Gén. ii. 60.
[1688]. Orfila, Tox. Gén. 1813, ii. 254.
[1689]. Reports of Medical Cases, ii. 203.
[1690]. Repertorium für die Pharmacie, xxxi. 174.—Professor Orfila, in the last edition of his Toxicologie Gén. [1843, ii. 253], has attacked in no very measured terms this opinion of Professor Buchner and myself. But, although he professes to give a literal translation of the passage above, he has translated it so incorrectly as wholly to misrepresent our opinion. The close of the paragraph, “chemical analysis must often fail to detect opium where there could be no doubt of its having been administered in large quantity,” is rendered into French by the Parisian Professor in these words,—“l’analyse chimique, propre à constater l’existence de l’opium, est souvent inutile, même dans le cas ou il existe une grande quantité de cette substance,”—which is a very different proposition. Orfila clearly overrates the utility of the process for detecting opium, both in this criticism and in his whole observations on the subject, by losing sight of the tendency of absorption to remove the poison beyond reach.
[1691]. Bombay Med. Phys. Transactions, i. 322.
[1692]. Die Verdauung nach Versuchen, &c.
[1693]. Journal of Science, N. S. vi. 56.
[1694]. Dr. Pereira states that he is obliged to differ from me upon this important subject for he “has several times obtained from the stomach of subjects in the dissecting-room a liquor which reddened the salts of iron” (Elements of Materia Medica, p. 1741). This fact, however, does not exactly touch the question. The reddening must be occasioned, not in the crude fluid, but with a substance obtained by the process of analysis for detecting meconic acid in complex organic mixtures,—otherwise the proposition in the text stands good.