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Updated: June 9, 2025
We may conclude from this reference to what has been done in the last few years, that the reproach mentioned in first speaking of the alkaloids as a class, that almost nothing was known of their constitution, will not long remain, and that as their molecular structure is laid bare in these studies now being made, keen-sighted chemists will effect their artificial formation.
The study of the decomposition products of the cinchona alkaloids especially points quite distinctly to the probable existence in quinine of a hydrogen addition product of pyridine, in combination with a methyl-quinoline group. The many experiments that are now being made to test this and other questions that suggest themselves, will not long leave us in the dark.
Chemists all admitted two things first, that their constitution was very complex, and, second, that the synthesis of any of the more important medicinal alkaloids would be an eminently desirable thing to effect from every point of view.
Of these nitrogenous alkaloids, even the nuts of the tree, which furnishes the most powerful, swift poison of the world, contains but three the above-named strychnia, brucia, and ignatia principles shared in common with its pathological congener, the St. Ignatius bean. First, those whose action is merely acrid so far as known expending themselves upon the mucous coats.
As a matter of fact, the active principles of all three are alkaloids, practically identical and equally effective. Each derives its value from its influence on the nervous system, which it stimulates, while checking the waste of tissue, but the cocoa-bean provides in addition solid food to replace wasted tissue.
Many years ago scientists analyzed its poisonous alkaloids and found what they called bulbosine. Later it was named muscarin, and now is sometimes known as amanitin, since it is confined to the mushrooms of the Amanita genus. "Amanitin is a wonderful and dangerous alkaloid, which is absorbed in the intestinal canal. It is extremely violent.
This view is corroborated by the circumstance that the tropical cinchonas, if cultivated in our feebly lighted hothouses, yield scarcely any alkaloids. Prof. Vogel has proved this experimentally. He has examined the barks of cinchona plants obtained from different conservatories, but has not found in any of them the characteristic reaction of quinine.
Heated with bromine water to 120°C. it decomposes into bromoform, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and pyridine. Turning now to the non-volatile and oxygenized bases, we take up first the opium alkaloids. Morphine, C H NO , is a tertiary amine, and appears to contain a hydroxyl group like phenols, to which class of bodies it has some analogies, as is shown in its reaction with ferric chloride.
The alkaloids, that most important class from a medical and pharmaceutical point of view, have until quite recently been defined in the books simply as "vegetable bases, containing nitrogen." Whether they were marsh-gas or benzol derivatives was not made out; how the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, were grouped together in them was absolutely a thing unknown.
If, having completed our survey of what has been done in the way of decomposing the alkaloids by the different classes of reagents, we review the field, it will be seen that with all the alkaloids mentioned, except the last four, a more or less immediate connection with the pyridine and quinoline bases has been indicated.
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