348 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



advantage of using the products of tissue-change and of the certain use of 

 the correct organisms is clear, but we respectfully demur to the suggestion that 

 dosage is more easily regulated. Auto-inoculation calls out a quite unknown dose, 

 and that too of living organisms. 



We gather that in the author's opinion rational immunisation consists in 

 leaving patients alone who are doing well, and employing auto-inoculation with 

 the others, especial care being required with patients who are going down hill. 



D. W. C arm alt Jones. 



On the Poison of Venomous Snakes and the Methods of Preventing Death, 

 from their Bite. Reprinted papers by the late Sir Joseph Fayrer, Bt., 

 K.C.S.I., M.D., F.R.C.P., F.R.S. ; Sir Lauder Brunton, Bt, LL.D., 

 M.D., F.R.C.P., F.R.S. ; and Major Leonard Rogers, I. M.S., M.S., 

 F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S. [Pp. 174.] (London : Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1909. 

 2s. 6a 7 .) 



It is to Sir Lauder Brunton that the reissue, in book form, of this important series 

 of six pioneer articles, originally published between 1873 ar >d 1904 in the Proceedings 

 of the Royal Society, is immediately due. Five of the papers are the joint pro- 

 duction of Fayrer and Brunton, and the remaining one that of these writers and 

 Rogers, by whom the later experimental work was carried out. 



The first two deal particularly with the effects of cobra- and krait-poison, and 

 with that of the Indian viper, Daboia Riisseliii. In the third the venom of the 

 American rattlesnake is compared with the above-mentioned Indian snake-poisons, 

 both on animals and on various forms of animal and vegetal protoplasm. Pulsation 

 of the Ve7ice cava and pulmonary veins, independently of the heart, is the subject 

 of the fourth article. This had been noted, in the second paper, in animals 

 killed by cobra-poison, and is here shown to arise under other circumstances. 

 The fifth article deals with some antidotes to cobra bite, viz. platinic chloride, 

 chloride of gold, and permanganate of potassium, all of which are shown to be 

 chemically, rather than physiologically, antagonistic to the poison. 



Nearly thirty years elapsed between the appearance of the fifth and sixth 

 papers. During this interval the value of permanganate of potash had been 

 redescribed, and re-emphasised by Couty and Lacerda, and by Vincent Richards. 



The sixth paper describes work by Leonard Rogers, with an ingenious instru- 

 ment due to Lauder Brunton, on the antidotal value of the permanganate which 

 had been described by Brunton and Fayrer in 1878, and still earlier by P'ayrer in 

 his work on the Thanatophidia of India. These experiments, carried out in 

 the Physiological Laboratory of the University of London, confirmed and ex- 

 tended the original finding, showing that, in vitro, the drug destroys most (if not 

 all) snake venoms. In vivo, circumstances restricted the work to the venoms of 

 two snakes — the cobra and the krait. The venom was injected into the part most 

 frequently bitten — a limb— the limb bandaged above the injection, the site of the 

 injection freely incised, and crystals of the permanganate rubbed well into the 

 wound. The results are set forth in tabular form, and show inter alia the dose of 

 poison per kilo body-weight, and the influence of delay between inoculation and 

 treatment. They are, as claimed, most encouraging and, if less striking than those 

 yielded under favourable circumstances by antivenomous sera, point to an 

 exceedingly valuable "first aid," owing to the stability and antiseptic action of the 

 drug and the extreme simplicity of the apparatus and procedure. 



