Said to be useful for toothache and spongy gums. Cocaine and its salts, although selling at one time as high as 3s. 6d. per grain, are now reduced to a very moderate price. CHAPTER XV. USES OF COCAINE. The curious property cocaine possesses of producing local anæsthesia was even noted by the discoverer of the alkaloid—Niemann, who, so far back as 1860, wrote: “It produces temporary insensibility on the part of the tongue with which it comes in contact” (Watts’s Dict., 1st Edition, i. 1059, _ex_ “Ann. Ch. Pharm.” cxiv. 215). This interesting fact lay dormant until in 1884, Herr Koller, a medical student in Vienna, was led to test the local anæsthetic action of the hydrochlorate of the alkaloid, on account of the effect he had witnessed when cocaine in solution was pencilled upon the pharynx to render it less susceptible in laryngoscopic examination. A vial of the solution was given by Herr Koller to Dr. Brettauer, of Trieste, who, on Sept. 15th, 1884, demonstrated its properties at the meeting of the Ophthalmological Congress in Heidelberg. Several experiments were made with the two per cent. solution, which showed that when two drops of the liquid were placed upon the surface of the normal cornea, and the application repeated after an interval of ten minutes, at the end of ten minutes more, the sensibility of the cornea was so far diminished that it could be pressed with a probe; the cornea and the surface of the eyeball and eyelids adjoining could be rubbed; a speculum could be inserted and the lids widely separated, the conjunctiva could even be seized with fixation forceps, and the eye moved in various directions without causing the patient notable discomfort.