INTRODUCTION. 



Popular tradition has long nourished a general aversion to serpents. This 

 dread, fostered by the singular qualities of the snake tribe, has beQome so familiar 

 an idea to most minds, as to lead to the belief that it is of instinctive origin, and 

 not sown, as it surely is, by the hand of traditional prejudice. 



However produced, dread and disgust seem to have had some influence in 

 preventing physicians in this country from investigating the venom of the species 

 of serpents, whose strange peculiarities and fatal powers have most urged them 

 upon their notice. It has thus happened, that with the exception of the Essays 

 of Barton and Brainard, the cis-Atlantic literature of this subject has been confined 

 to scattered notices and incomplete statements of cases, to be found with difficulty 

 in the pages of our numerous medical journals. 



Apart from the European and East Indian publications upon snake-bites, we 

 know or have learned but little that is new ; and if we except the works of 

 Fontana, Mangili, Bonaparte, and one or two others, in no part of the world has 

 modern science done much to further this inquiry. 



Such being the case, I conceive that no excuse is required in presenting the 

 results of investigations upon a subject which has peculiar claims on the attention 

 of our countrymen. 



A large part of what is here set forth has some pretension to be regarded as 

 original research ; but the subject is so ample, and has presented itself under so 

 many points of view, that I can scarcely regard this paper as more than a re-opening 

 uf the matter ; and I feel that however full it may be upon some points, it is rather 

 tlio pledge of future labors than a complete exposition of the subject upon which 

 it treats. For the researches which form the novel part of the following essay, I 

 claim only exactness of detail and honesty of statement. Where the results have 

 appeared to me inconclusive, and where further experimental questioning has not 

 resolved the doubt, I have fairly confessed my inability to settle the matter. This 

 course I have adhered to in every such instance, thinking it better to state the 

 known uncertainty thus created than to run the risk of strewing my path with 

 errors in the garb of seeming truths. 



In the following researches I have made use almost altogether of the single 

 1 



