Water torts Letter to Professor Jameson. 191 



that night, while drawing off his boots, he felt slightly 

 scratched on the leg : . . . [he] expired before any succour 

 could be applied with success ; the cause of his illness, also, 

 being quite a mystery. . . . His effects were sold, and a second 

 brother . . . purchased the boots, and, if I remember rightly, 

 put them on about two years after. As he drew them off, he 

 felt a scratch, and complained of it, when the widowed sister, 

 being present, recollected that the same pain had been felt 

 by her husband on the like occasion. The youth went to 

 bed, suffered and died in the same way that his father and 

 brother had before him. These repeated and singular deaths 

 being rumoured in the country, a medical gentleman called 

 upon the friends of the deceased to enquire into the par- 

 ticulars, and at once pronounced their deaths to have been 

 occasioned by venom. The boots that had been the cause of 

 complaint were brought to him, when he cut one of them open 

 with care, and discovered the extreme point of the fang of a 

 rattlesnake issuing from the leather, and assured the people 

 that this had done all the mischief. To prove this satisfac- 

 torily, he scratched with it the nose of a dog ; and the dog 

 died in a few hours, from the poisonous effect it was still able 

 to convey." We shall now give an 



Abstract of Mr. Waterton's Animadversions. — " Here we 

 have two men and a dog poisoned by scratches. I challenge 

 the whole world to produce one solitary instance of any ani- 

 mal being poisoned by the scratch of a rattlesnake's fang, or 

 any other poisonous snake's fang. The formation of the 

 fang itself shows beyond all doubt whatever that this cannot 

 possibly be the case. The wound is always a puncture, as 

 though it had been done by the point of a pin. . . . Audubon 

 expressly states that it was the extreme point of the fang 

 which had done all the mischief. . . . The extreme point of all 

 serpents' fangs is a solid bone, and . . . the aperture through 

 which the poison flows, when the snake is alive, is on the 

 convex side of the curved fang, at a distance from the point. 

 This being an absolute fact, it is utterly impossible that the 

 dog should have been poisoned by a scratch. Suppose for 

 an instant there was poison in the aperture, that poison was 

 in a dried state ; and, before it could have been moistened, 

 the . . . doctor would have had to thrust the broken fang into 

 the nose till the orifice was covered ; and there it must have 

 remained for some time before its contents could be in a 

 state to enter the circulation. . . . What I have said of the dog 

 will equally apply to the two younger Doodles, who got their 

 deaths by jumping into their father's boots. . . . Again, . . . the 

 wound which the farmer received, and which was so slight 



