I2i8 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



lime, and some fifty years ago there was a short-lived therapeutic 

 craze when everyone drank lime-water. We forget what it was 

 supposed to cure, but it made for longevity. 



But the third kind of prescription with a smack of reasonableness 

 is even more interesting. Dried toads and ashes of toads have been 

 used medicinally since the time of Aristotle, and it is striking to 

 learn that the alkaloid phrynin, abundant in the skin glands of the 

 toad, causes, when injected, contraction of the arterioles, rise of 

 blood- pressure, increased heart-beat, and so on, which might have 

 a good effect in cases of dropsy due to heart affection. Personally, 

 we do not know, but the prescription seems on a higher plane 

 than that which recommends eating a lizard to cure leprosy. 



A fine illustration may be found in connection with snake-bite. 

 The venom is a toxic protein, produced by the salivary glands — 

 a good instance of Nature's way of making an apparently new thing 

 out of what is really very old. (a) Now, the natives of various warm 

 countries have been in the habit of drinking diluted snake-poison 

 to render themselves immune; and this is surely in line with the 

 modern recommendations of the late Sir Thomas Eraser of Edin- 

 burgh and Dr. Calmette of Paris that an anti-toxin serum, pre- 

 pared from animals into which small doses of snake-poison have 

 been injected, should be utilised for patients suffering from snake- 

 bite, (b) In many of the indigenous snake-bite remedies, the bile of 

 the snake is an important constituent, and it has been shown by 

 Fraser and Phisalix that the snake's (e.g. the adder's) bile is an 

 antidote to its own poison, (c) An old Indian remedy is to chew 

 the root of tulsi, a much-esteemed labiate plant, and the value of 

 such treatment is confirmed by the work of Phisalix and others, 

 showing that vegetable tyrosin from the dahlia root acts like 

 animal cholesterin in the bile as a counteractive to the poisonous 

 toxin of the snake's salivary juice. 



Another illustration of old animal prescriptions with a kernel of 

 truth may be found in those which recommended the coward to 

 eat the raw heart of a lion, the lethargic to dine on the brains of a 

 ram, and the jaundiced to try the liver of a fox. We smile at these 

 suggestions; but surely they point in the direction of the modern 

 treatment of those unfortunate subjects whose thyroid glands have 

 gone out of gear, with the result that goitre or myxoedema ensues, 

 for they are ordered to eat the thyroids of sheep and calf, or are 

 treated with doses of thyroid extract. Perhaps the old physicians 

 were not such fools as they sometimes seemed. Some of their queer 

 mixtures or philtres suggest that they may have had some adumbra- 

 tion of the extraordinary potency of what we call the glands of 

 internal secretion. 



The Story of Bilharzia.— We can find no finer example of 

 zoology helping medicine than Dr. Leiper's working out of the life- 



