160 VENOMS 
proteid substances to which venom owes its physiological pro- 
perties. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the chemistry of the 
albuminoid matters is still too imperfect for it to be possible for 
us to determine their nature. 
As early as 1843 it was pointed out by Lucien Bonaparte that 
in the venom of Vipera berus the most important principle 1s 
a proteid substance to which he gave the name of viperin or 
echidnin, and which he compared to the digestive ferments. 
Later on Weir Mitchell and Reichert, and subsequently Norris 
Wolfenden, Pedlar, Wall, Kanthack, C. J. Martin, and MacGarvie 
Smith, showed that venoms, like diastases, exhibit a great com- 
plexity in composition; that all their characteristic toxic constit- 
uents are precipitable by absolute alcohol, and that the precipitate, 
when redissolved in water, recovers the properties possessed by 
the venom before precipitation. 
According to Armand Gautier,’ venoms contain alkaloids. The 
latter may be obtained, in very small amounts, however, by finely 
pulverizing dried venom with carbonate of soda, and systematically 
exhausting the mixture with alcoholic ether at a temperature of 
50° C. These alkaloids have yielded crystallized chloraurates and 
chloroplatinates, and slightly deliquescent crystallized chlorhy- 
drates. The latter produce Prussian blue when treated with very 
dilute ferric salts, and mixed with a little red prussiate. They 
therefore represent reductive bodies analogous to ptomaines. 
Norris Wolfenden did not succeed in extracting these alkaloids 
from Cobra-venom, whence they had nevertheless been isolated 
by Armand Gautier. Wolcott Gibbs, and afterwards Weir 
Mitchell and Reichert, likewise failed to find them in Crotalus- 
venom. The toxicity of these bases is, moreover, but very slight, 
for the totality of the alkaloids extracted by A. Gautier from 
03 gramme of Cobra-venom did not kill a small bird. 
It is therefore to the toxalbumins that the toxic properties of 
venoms are essentially due. 
' Bulletin de l'Académie de Médecine, t. x., 1883, p. 947. 
