Phytopharmacology

Abstract

The author has called attention in numerous papers to the fact that living plant protoplasm may be a useful pharmacological test object and that indeed such phytopharmacological preparations may respond with greater sensitiveness to certain poisons than do living animal tissues. 1 He has also shown that plant pharmacological preparations may be especially sensitive to the effects of poisons of animal origin, possibly because such products are more foreign to plants than are the metabolic products of plant life. 2 In order to test this hypothesis the present experiments were undertaken and the results obtained are unequivocal. The author selected for study the effect on the growth of seedlings of Lupinus Albus 2 substances known as extremely poisonous, one of plant origin and the other of animal origin, namely, Ricin and Cantharadin. Ricin is well known to pharmacologists and toxicologists as one of the most deadly poisons, a few milligrams sufficing to produce death of a large animal. This substance sometimes spoken of as a toxalbumin is obtained from from the castor oil bean. Cantharadin is a crystalline body also of a very poisonous nature obtained from the Spanish fly (Cantharis Vesicatoria). Very dilute solutions of these 2 drugs were made and the effects of such solutions on the growth of Lupinus Albus seedlings were studied according to the methods already described. To prepare a solution or suspension of Ricin, in some experiments the drug was rubbed up in a mortar with cold saline, in other experiments a suspension or solution of the same was prepared by heating this substance in a large volume of distilled water. A solution of Cantharidin was prepared in a similar way. The results obtained are shown in the subjoined table.