THOUGHTS, OBSERVATIONS, AND 

 EXPERIMENTS ON THE ACTION 

 OF SNAKE VENOM ON THE 

 BLOOD. 



BY GEORGE BRITTON HALFORD, M.D. 



PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, 

 VICTORIA. 



In the year 1 867, Sir James Paget communicated to 

 the British Medical Journal two papers written by 

 me one of July 20, the other December 21. Sir James, 

 in forwarding the last communication, wrote " I hope 

 you will deem it right to publish this ; for the facts are 

 very strange so strange, that it may be well for me 

 to add that Professor Halford, writing to me, says, 

 that I may depend on the patience and fear of error 

 with which he has worked at them." 



I had been appointed to my present position by the 

 late lamented Sir Richard Owen and Sir James Paget, 

 I am pleased to say that all I then wrote, and the 

 drawings I sent, are absolutely true ; changing my 

 " germinal matter " to the more generally adopted term 

 " proteid." How comes it that I can demonstrate the 



