622 -A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



function as color filters for increasing visual acuity. All of Walls's work reflects 

 a lively interest in functional mechanisms rather than static structure. His major 

 work is The Vertebrate Eye and Its Adaptive Radiation, published by the Cran- 

 brook Institute of Science in 1942. 



Comparative functional anatomy, in which the description of adaptive mech- 

 anisms drives the student from the dissecting table to the living animal in the field 

 and from the field or zoo to the dissecting table, is a relatively new direction of 

 interest in verteberate anatomy. The phylogeny of adaptation may be pursued (as 

 by Walls) and an understanding of the structures involved is often to be gained 

 by the comparison of analogous, as distinguished from homologous, mechanisms. 

 An outstanding representative of this fertile movement in herpetology was Walter 

 Mosauer, a student of Franz Werner's in Vienna, who had made a notable contri- 

 bution to the anatomy of snakes and to the understanding of their locomotor 

 musculature before his untimely death in 1937. Mosauer had become a citizen of 

 the United States and had taken his doctor's degree at the University of Michigan. 



The Study of Snake Venom 



The study of snake venoms forms a large chapter of herpetology. The scien- 

 tific study of venoms and of the treatment of snakebite falls almost entirely within 

 the period 1850-1950. 



An important preliminary study by Dr. S. AVeir Mitchell (b. 1829, d. 1914), 

 in 1861, set the investigation of venoms and of the medical treatment of the bites 

 of poisonous snakes on a critical and experimental basis. Sir Joseph Fayrer's 

 TkanatopJiidia of India (1872) was supplemented by a series of papers on the 

 physiological effects of the venoms of Indian snakes by Fayrer and Brunton 

 (1872-1875), and further work was reported by A. J. Wall in Indian Snake 

 Poisons; Their Nature and Effects (1883). The whole subject is then summarized 

 by Mitchell and Reichert in Researches upon the Venoms of Poisonous Serpents 

 (1886), in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. 



A burst of interest in the treatment of snakebite came with the discovery that 

 antivenins are produced in tlie blood of animals inoculated with small successive 

 doses of venom, and that the degree of immunity can be built up by successively 

 increasing the dosage of venom. The pioneer students were H. Sewall, working 

 with rattlesnake venom and pigeons (1887), and Maurice Kaufmann, using the 

 venom of the European viper and the guinea pig (1889). This discovery led 

 directly to experiments by Marie Phisalix and G. Bertrand at the Paris Museum 

 and A. Calmette at the Pasteur Institute at Lille on the use of the blood serum 

 of immunized animals as an antidote in snake poisoning. This set the stage for 

 the development of institutes for the production and distribution of antivenins 

 for general use. Pasteur Institutes were established at Calcutta and Bangkok. 

 The Instituto Butantan at Sao Paulo, Brazil, was set up as much for research 

 as for antivenin production. The Mulford Drug Company's antivenin division in 

 the United States (with its successors) grew out of the interest aroused by the 

 Antivenin Institute of America, which published a Bulletin (1927-1932). In 

 South Africa, centers of antivenin production were developed, as at Port Eliza- 

 beth. In Australia critical studies of snake venoms have been in progress under 

 the direction of H. C. Kellaway since 1929. The enthusiastic interest aroused by 



