POISONS AND THEIR PREVENTION 193 



its unsavoury surroundings are proverbial, can be 

 held responsible for poisoning those who eat it 

 has never, we believe, been seriously maintained, 

 although there is an old Italian saying which bids 

 us " give eels and no wine to our enemies." 



Public confidence, however, in the eel as an 

 article of food need not be shaken, for it is satis- 

 factory to learn that researches which, on the one 

 hand, condemn eels as living generators of a highly 

 poisonous substance, on the other hand allay any 

 alarm which they may have reasonably raised by 

 showing that this toxic principle is entirely de- 

 stroyed in the processes of digestion, and that, 

 _ therefore, taken through the mouth it is rendered 

 harmless, and only when introduced into the system 

 by inoculation beneath the skin or injected into 

 the peritoneum can it assert its dangerous pro- 

 perties. That the blood of eels is, however, justi- 

 fiably to be in future classed amongst the toxins, 

 the number of which has of late been so increased, 

 is at once apparent when we learn that about a 

 dozen drops inoculated into a dog weighing about 

 fourteen pounds will destroy the latter in less than 

 ten minutes, whilst pigeons, rabbits, and guinea- 

 pigs similarly treated, only with smaller quantities, 

 also invariably succumb to its lethal action. 



Quite recently an endeavour has been made to 

 determine precisely the degree of toxicity possessed 



