It was observed by _Bichât_, and the observation has been fully confirmed by _Brodie_, that the influence of the brain is not _directly_ necessary to the action of the heart; and is _immediately_ necessary to life, only because the muscles of respiration owe their action to its influence.[223] For when the functions of the brain are destroyed, even when the head is removed, the heart continues to contract for some time afterwards, and then ceases only in consequence of the suspension of respiration, which is under the direct influence of the brain. Assuming this as a fact, it will appear evident that certain poisons may, by affecting the brain, so paralyse the muscles of respiration as to occasion death by suffocation, and by such a mode of operation I imagine that those substances, arranged in the former division of my first class, prove mortal. _Mr. Brodie_ accordingly found that, by the administration of a large dose of alcohol to a rabbit, the pupils of its eyes became dilated, the extremities convulsed, and the respiration laborious, and that this latter function was gradually performed at longer and longer intervals, and that it at length entirely ceased. Two minutes after the apparent death of the animal, he opened the thorax, and found the heart acting with moderate force and frequency, _circulating dark coloured blood_; he then introduced a tube into the trachea, and produced artificial respiration by inflating the lungs, and he found that by these means the action of the heart might be kept up to the natural standard, as in an animal from whom the head is removed. The same phenomena resulted from the injection of two drops of the _Essential Oil of Bitter Almonds_, diffused in half an ounce of water, into the rectum of a cat; and from the application of the empyreumatic oil of _Tobacco_ to the tongue, and rectum of cats and dogs. Now it is obvious that the functions of the brain are immediately disordered by the influence of these poisons on the tongue, stomach, and lower bowels of animals, so instantaneously, that it is impossible absorption should have already taken place.