16 Professor Halford. 



The Fluidity of the Blood after the Bites 

 of Venomous Snakes. 



Drs. Weir Mitchell and Reichert in their Researches 

 on the Venoms of Poisonous Serpents (" Smithsonian 

 Contributions to Knowledge, 1 886 ") state that 



(1) " Venom exerts a powerful local effect upon the 

 living tissues, and induces more rapid necrotic changes 

 than any other known organic substance. It causes 

 oedema, swelling, attended with darkening of the parts 

 by infiltration of incoagulable blood, breaking down of 

 the tissues, putrefaction, and sloughing." 



(Compare the effects produced by the littJe English 

 adder, ut supra). 



(2) ' ' When brought in contact with the vascular tissue 

 of a warm blooded animal, it produces such a change 

 in the capilliary blood-vessels that their walls are 

 unable to resist the normal blood pressure, thus allow- 

 the blood corpuscles to escape into the tissues. The 

 lesions are not, however, analogous to those ol 

 inflammation, since in the latter process, it is princi- 

 pally the white blood corpuscles which emigrate from 

 the vessels, and the blood is highly coagulable, while 

 here the blood exudes en masse, and coagulates with 

 difficulty, if at all." 



Dr. C. J. Martin has repeated these experiments 

 with Australian black snake venom, and the results 

 were identical.* 



It is not possible for me to pass over Sir Joseph 

 Fayrer's work, " The Thanatophidia of India." There 

 is much that he says that is entitled to great respect, 

 but there is also much with which I cannot agree. 



* Journal of Physiology, Vol. XV, No. 4, 1893. 



