POISONOUS SNAKES OF NORTH AMERICA. 457 



species is a bright salmon red, the scales of the inferior rows punctu- 

 late with brown. 



Rostral broad as long; 7 [scales] between superciliaries, 3 below 

 orbits; labials, 14; 2 very small preorbitals and 4 loreals. Pale Ver- 

 million varied with yellow on the sides of the belly, with numerous 

 arge reddish-bay transverse hexagons, which become transverse bands 

 on posterior two-thirds of length; yellow below. 



Geofiraphical (lutrihution. — Only one specimen is known, viz: the 

 type which Dr. E. Coues obtained in Canyon Prieto, not far from Fort 

 Whipple, Arizona. 



Rahits. — Ai»pears to be a desert form. 



THE POISON OF THE POISONOUS SNAKES. 



The deadly duid which from time immemorial has inspired dread and 

 woader in the human mind, not only by its fatal results but also by its 

 mysterious apparent variability, early became a subject of study and 

 speculation. More than two hundred years ago a iJedi and a Charras 

 published their observations on the European vipers and their poison, 

 and all through the eighteenth century experiments with various ven- 

 oms and their supposed antidotes were common. Some of the investi- 

 gators of those early dates did good work, notably the Italian savant, 

 Felix Fontana, who arrived at some results which, though contradicted 

 and unheeded by many authors who ought to have known better, have 

 been fully corroborated by the latest investigations. 



Very little was discovered as to the real nature of the poison, how- 

 ever, the definite constituency of which the older exjjerimentors had 

 no means of ascertaining. They could only know its grosser physical 

 characteristics, for chemistry, and especially organic chemistry, had 

 not yet reached such a development that it could tackle the intricate 

 problems involved in such investigations. All that was gained was a 

 prodigious number of so-called antidotes, most of which, in their turn, 

 were declared infallible, though very few of them ever gained a gen- 

 eral acceptance. In nearly all instances miraculous cures and surpris- 

 ingly sudden recoveries were recorded, but, sad to say, in other cases 

 even the best reputed remedies failed. It has remained for the last 

 decades to ruthlessly annihilate the claims of most of these " antidotes." 



Prince Lucien Bonaparte, in 1843, seems to have been the lirst to 

 make a chemical analysis of the viper poison, the result of his research 

 being that it is albuminoid or proteid in its nature. The supposed 

 active i)rinciplc he called echidnine, or viperine. Less than twenty 

 years after. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, of Philadelphia, commenced a series 

 of analyses and experiments on the poison of the rattlesnake, giving 

 a result similar to Bonaparte's, the corroboration of the albuminoid 

 nature of the venomous substance, which in this case received the name 

 crotaline. 



