THE PHYSIOLOGY OF POISONING 181 
C. J. Martin, in experimenting upon rats with the venom of 
Pseudechis (CoLUBRID%), has succeeded in keeping these animals 
alive for a whole week by providing them every day with a ration 
of bread. and milk mixed with a dose of venom one hundred 
times greater than the lethal dose for a subcutaneous injection. 
This innocuousness of the venoms of CoLUBRID®, which I have 
frequently been able to establish by causing them to be ingested by 
different animals, is explained by the fact that the pancreatic juice 
and the ptyalin of the saliva very rapidly modify the proteic sub- 
stances to which these venoms owe their toxicity, so that this 
disappears. No trace of them is found in the feces. 
The glandular secretions of persons bitten by venomous snakes, 
and those of animals inoculated with doses of venom calculated 
to kill only after a few hours, are not infrequently found to be 
toxic. In the case of the urine in particular this has been shown 
to be so. 
Observations have also been recorded by C. Francis! and Sir 
Joseph Fayrer with reference to the passage of venom through the 
mammary gland. In the year 1893 a poor Mussulman woman died 
at Madras from the bite of a Cobra. She was nursing her child 
at the time, and the latter succumbed in its turn a few hours later, 
with all the symptoms of poisoning, although it had not itself been 
bitten, and had been suckled by its mother only once since the 
bite. 
The histological lesions produced by snake poisoning have been 
particularly well studied by Hindale,? Karlinski Nowak, Louis 
Vaillant-Hovius,’ and Zeliony.® 
l Indian Annals, July, 1868. 
? Medical News, Philadelphia, 1884. 
34 Zur Pathologie des Schlangenbisses,”’ Forschungen der Medicin, Berlin, 
1890. 
1 Annales de l'Institut Pasteur, t. xii., 1898, p. 369. 
* Thèse Bordeaux, 1902. 
6 Virchow’s Archiv für Pathologie, Anatomie, und Physiologie, Band 179, 1905. 
