VARIOUS EXPERIMENTS. 385 
snakes, recovery frequently took place when higher animals 
were experimented on, Success was in proportion to the quantity 
of poison injected, the time which had elapsed between the appli- 
cation of the remedy and the time of the injection of the venom. 
If the potash was applied five minutes or more after the injection 
of venom, it was unsuccessful, and death always occurred. In 
every case animals showed absolutely no signs of poisoning 
when I injected a mixture of venom and permanganate. In 
many instances I mixed fifty times a fatal dose of Cobra venom 
with a little permanganate and injected it without any poisonous 
effect. 
The permanganate of potash was found to be useless in the 
case of highly susceptible animals such as fowls and rabbits, 
these creatures often dying within five minutes after the entry 
of the venom into their tissues. On experimentation I found 
that fowls and rabbits died rapidly if even a very small dose 
of venom was injected into them—a dose not nearly sufficient 
to cause death in higher animals. They were particularly 
susceptible to Cobra, Ringhals, and Boomslang venom, usually 
dying within ten minutes—sometimes instantly. It was 
apparent that when these animals were bitten, enough venom 
was at once taken up into the blood vessels to cause death, hence 
the reason the potash did not avert a fatal issue. 
This can be better realized when it is learned that a Cobra 
is able to inject a hundred or more fatal doses into a small 
animal at a single full bite. In experiments on Vervet monkeys 
and half-grown Baboons with Cape Cobras I found that if a full 
bite was inflicted, it was useless ligaturing and applying perman- 
ganate to the scarified wounds. The reason was that sufficient 
venom got absorbed to cause death before it was possible to apply 
any treatment for the purpose of retarding the absorption of the 
venom, or destroying it in the wound. A full bite is understood 
to mean when the snake grips like a dog and holds on for a few 
seconds. 
Judging from these experiments, it is reasonable to conclude 
that if a person be bitten by a venomous snake, and if he rubs : 
permanganate of potash into incisions made over the site of the 
punctures and a ligature applied within five minutes of the in- 
fliction of the bite, and if proper secondary treatment is carried 
out, he would, in most instances, recover. It must be remembered, 
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