102 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XVIII. 



opinion that the bite, if inflicted by a snake at all, was caused by a 

 harmless kind. The man showed no symptoms of inoculation by snake 

 venom, and speedily recovered when reassured as to the nature of the 

 wounds. One case only that I heard of was probably one of snake- 

 poisoning. I was absent from the station at the time, but the medical 

 officer who attended, and was called in only when the man was in the 

 act of expiring, related the conditions which made a diagnosis of snake- 

 poisoning extremely probable. The Cantonment Magistrate very kindly 

 furnished me with the reputed fatalities from snakebite in the Cantonment 

 for a period of ten years, and though they appear astonishingly few when 

 one considers the large population of poisonous snakes and the numbers 

 of barefooted people in Cantonments, it is a fact that the figures 

 returned for this station represent a mortality more than twice the 

 average for the whole of India. Recently a question was put in the 

 House of Commons asking the snakebite mortality for India, which 

 elicited the following figures from Mr. Morley for thirty years up to 

 1905. The average in the first decade was 95 "5 per annum per million, 

 for the second 10O9, and for the third 98*1, i.e., 98 per million for 30 

 years. It will be seen that in ten years in Fyzabad Cantonments 11 

 deaths were returned as due to snakebite. 



Deaths from Snakebite in Fyzabad. 



According to the Census of 1891 the Cantonment population was 5,346. 

 This for five years amounts to 26,730. The population in 1901 was 

 6,096, so that for five years the figures are 30,480. 



The aggregate population for this decade may be taken, therefore, 

 as 57,210. 



11 deaths in a population of 57,210 works out to about 198 per 

 million. 



