ZOOLOGY. 357 



back into the mouth, and it comes in contact with the saliva, then it instant- 

 ly dies, and becomes materially altered in appearance. Examine the con- 

 tents of the first three stomachs of a cow, or a sheep; in the two first the 

 food is evidently living grass, but in the third it has the appearance of a 

 thoroughly well-boiled vegetable more nearly allied in color and appear- 

 ance to spinach, and, as yet, it has only come in contact with the saliva, 

 which must be held responsible for its changed condition. Arrest a caterpil- 

 lar in the act of eating a leaf of a cabbage; kill it instantly, open its crop, 

 and examine the leaf you saw it consume but a minute before; it will have 

 lost its bright green color, and be reduced, in every respect, to the appear- 

 ance of the grass in the third stomach of the cow. As it cannot have come 

 in contact with any other material than the salivary secretion, it is surely 

 justifiable to attribute its altered appearance to the action of that fluid. 

 When man eats raw, ripe fruits, he eats living vegetables, and if he put 

 them into his stomach in that state, there they will remain, for no stomach 

 has the power to destroy the vitality of anything, as, if it had, assuredly it 

 would destroy and digest itself, a contingency that always happens in death. 

 Nothing is more common, at post-mortem examinations, than to find that 

 a portion of the stomach has actually thus acted upon itself. 



To show the universality of this particular chemical property of destroy- 

 ing life, let us see what takes place among the lower animals. Bulk for 

 bulk, weight for weight, can anything exceed the pain of a mosquito bite, to 

 say nothing of the long continued after consequences ? 



What gives rise to this extreme suffering ? Surely it cannot be the inser- 

 tion of its tubular sheath and tiny jaws, because if the flesh were stabbed at 

 the same time with a dozen large stocking needles, the pain would not be 

 nearly so great, and the wound would sooner heal. When a spider bites a 

 fly, why does the insect die instantly, and its body swell up prodigiously ? 

 If a rattlesnake, or other, so-called, poisonous serpent bite a man, why is the 

 wound almost universally fatal ? If a dog, not rabid, bite a man, or if a cow, 

 horse, hog, raccoon, fox (and many other animals), do the same thing, or if 

 one man bite another, why, in any or all these circumstances, should the bitten 

 person be liable to hydrophobia? To these questions, which might be 

 greatly extended, there is but one answer, namely, that the person bitten 

 has been in every instance inoculated with the saliva of the other animal, 

 and that one of its chief properties is to destroy life. To them and to us it is 

 a natural secretion, and so harmless is it, under some circumstances, that a 

 man may drink any quantity of the poison (saliva) of a rattlesnake, and it 

 will have none other effect than to help him to digest his food! But if inoc- 

 ulated into the circulation of the blood, it becomes a virulent, a fatal poison. 

 Who can doubt that, if a mosquito were as large as a good sized dog, its sali- 

 va would be as immediately and certainly fatal as the bite of a rattlesnake ? 

 The pain that we share with domestic and other animals, from the bite of par- 

 asitic insects, is solely due to this cause inoculation by their saliva. The 

 division of the salivary glands among the reptiles would appear to throw 

 some light on the function of each, or certainly some of them ; thus : the 

 poisonous reptiles possess only j^rotid glands, the secretion of which descends 

 by the channels of the fangs of the upper jaw; the use they make of them 

 would seem to establish the function and properties of these particular glands. 

 The boa constrictor (Python Tigris) has no parotid ghuuls, neither can he 

 destroy his prey by a bite, but he entwines his body around his victim, and 

 kills him as a bear would, by an embrace. But what is now to be done? he 



