112 ANAPHYLAXIS AND ANTT-ANAPHYLAXIS 



govern the relation of the colloids to one another.'* 

 The only object of this conception, formulated, it is 

 true, in general terms, was at that time to put for- 

 ward the idea of a physical process in opposition to 

 that of a definite chemical poison. 



In exposing, as we have just done, the principal 

 theories of anaphylaxis current at the present moment, 

 our idea has been to gather together all the evidence 

 in order that the reader might be in a position to form 

 his own opinion. 



Before passing on to the statement of our own 

 conception of anaphylaxis, the different elements of 

 which have already been sketched in the previous 

 chapters, we think it may be well to return to the 

 nature of the disturbances caused by the anaphylo- 

 toxins, the poisons of Kraus and Biedl, Vaughan, 

 Doerr, and other experimenters. 



It is the similarity of these disturbances to those 

 observed in the course of anaphylaxis, a similarity 

 quite disturbing at first sight, which is, in our opinion, 

 the principal cause of confusion. However, when 

 one thinks about it, there can be no great choice in 

 the mode of dying in a guinea-pig which dies in a 

 few minutes from intravenous injection; the clinical 

 picture which precedes its rapid death is always 

 perceptibly the same. It is not so much the nature 

 of the substance injected which determines the 

 symptoms of death as the rapidity with which one 

 injection follows another, and especially the intra- 

 vascular manner of the injection, which stamps them 

 with special character. 



It is not, then, to be wondered at that, side by 

 side with the real anaphylactic disturbances, others 

 are observed so similar as to be mistaken for them, 

 but not arising from the same cause. 



Let us take, to settle matters, the anaphylotoxins, 

 which, of all the poisons called anaphylactic, are the 



