SCHMIDT: HERPETOLOGY 623 



the all-but-miraculoiis recoveries from serious cases of snake-poisoning in human 

 beings after the injection of antivenin, together with the sound basis of fact as to 

 immunization in general, led to great public interest and government support for 

 such institutes. 



The first major difficulty to develop in the treatment of snakebite with anti- 

 venin lies in the radical difference between the neurotoxic venoms of the cobra 

 and its relatives and the haemotoxic venoms of the vipers and pit-vipers. This is 

 especially complicated by the fact that the widespread South American rattle- 

 snake, alone among the pit-vipers, has a powerfully neurotoxic venom. Further- 

 more, it soon developed that the antivenins were in general strictly specific. The 

 fact that the venoms of the many different species of poisonous snakes are sharply 

 peculiar to the species, and that the antivenin prepared from inoculation with 

 venom of the banded rattlesnake, for example, would not serve as an antidote for 

 the bite of the copperhead, led to the production of "polyvalent antivenins." The 

 specificity of venoms may be sharply marked even within otherwise barely dis- 

 tinguishable races of a single species, and thus adds an example of the biochemical 

 nature of species differentiation. 



The antivenin institutes, in retrospect, appear to have acquired a "vested 

 interest" in snake bite, and their statistics are in urgent need of critical review. 

 In 1927, Dr. Dudley Jackson, of San Antonio, Texas, found that in rattlesnake 

 bite, incisions and suction on the swollen limb would lead to a high percentage of 

 cures without antivenin. Afranio do Amaral, long Director of the Instituto Bu- 

 tantan, was led to propose progressively greater dosages of antivenin, finally to 

 the amount of 225 cc. This, on the face of it, introduces new dangers and new 

 problems. At midcentury the subject is thus in need of a renewed objective and 

 critical study. 



Experimental Physiology and Embryology 



The broad fields of experimental investigation into physiologic and develop- 

 mental processes have had so great a growth in the 1850-1950 century, and their 

 focus has been so much on the process and on the principles involved and so little 

 on the particular experimental animal, that the history of the herpetological 

 aspects of these sciences and their bearing on the growth of herpetology as a 

 whole need not be elaborated here. A late bibliography of experimental embry- 

 ology is available in Eugh's work with this title (1948). Salamanders, with their 

 capacity for complete regeneration of limbs, have been especially favorable ma- 

 terial for studies in regeneration (T. H. IMorgan, Regeneration, 1901; E. Kor- 

 schelt, Regeneration and Transplantation, 1907). For a conspectus of the litera- 

 ture on general physiology as applied to amphibians and reptiles reference may 

 be made to Heilbrunn's Outline of General Physiology (1943) and to Comparative 

 Animal Physiology, edited by C. Ladd Prosser (1950). The physiology of the 

 whole animal, which relates it to its environment, is a part of ecology. 



Ecology and Herpetology 



Ecology, as natural history made critical and exact, stands in direct relation 

 to modern herpetology, and requires thoughtful assessment of its origins and 

 present status in this relation. Taxonomic herpetology in the Boulengerian Era 



