196 BACTERIA IN DAILY LIFE 



blood serum be taken from animals previously 

 rendered artificially immune to the action of 

 serpent venom, and if some of this so-called 

 anti-venomous serum be injected under the 

 skin of eels some hours before they are killed, 

 the lethal properties of their blood after death are 

 considerably reduced. Thus, an eel weighing 

 about six ounces received subcutaneous injections 

 of five cubic centimetres of anti-venomous serum ; 

 after the lapse of four-and-twenty hours it was 

 killed and bled, and its serum inoculated into 

 animals in the usual way. But whereas two cubic 

 centimetres of normal eel blood sufficed to kill a 

 guinea-pig, this eel's blood had to be administered 

 in twice that quantity to produce a fatal result, so 

 that its toxic character had been reduced to a very 

 appreciable extent. The readiness with which 

 eel serum parts with its lethal properties, and the 

 restricted conditions under which they can operate, 

 sufficiently assure us that in the present state of 

 our knowledge there is no danger to be appre- 

 hended from this fish, and in the absence of any 

 experiments to show what is the effect on human 

 beings of subcutaneous inoculations of such blood, 

 there is no call for this substance to be scheduled 

 under the Poisons Act. We have, however, by no 

 means exhausted the extremely curious properties 

 which characterise this material, and these pro- 



