10 Professor Bedford. 



bruising. My remarks, at the time, were " What a 

 wonderful effect viper poison must have on the blood- 

 vessels or blood, or on both." 



Next in the order of time, namely October 1852, 

 came the death of the attendant at the Zoological 

 Gardens in London ; he was bitten on the nose by a 

 cobra, and died in ninet}^ minutes. I knew the 

 man. and was in the Gardens the same day. The 

 post-mortem examination was made by Mr. Marshall, 

 and this is what he said: " Externally, there was 

 more ecchymosis than is generally the case, especially 

 in the face and at the back, from the nape of the neck 

 to the calves of the legs ; the purple colour being more 

 uniform and less mottled than usual. On dissecting 

 off a portion of the skin over the angular artery and 

 vein, between the root of the nose and the inner 

 canthus of the eyes, the cellular tissue was found 

 strongly ecchymosed. The blood was altogether dark, 

 alkaline, and fluid, and it emitted a peculiar sour and 

 sickly smell. The effect of this morbid poison seemed 

 to be very much like that produced by the i-ngestion 

 of prussic acid." 



I must now quote from a paper read March 10, 1864, 

 by Dr. George Harley, and published in the " Philo- 

 sophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London," 

 entitled " On the Physical and Chemical Agents upon 

 Blood, with special reference to the mutual action of 

 the Blood and the Respiratory Gases." A dog was 

 twice bitten by an African puff-adder, and died in two 

 and a quarter hours ; the post-mortem appearances are 

 thus described by Dr. Harley : '* The tissues presented 

 a very strange appearance, viz., numerous extravasa- 

 tions of blood throughout the body, some small, some 

 large. For example, in this animal there was an 



