SWALLOWING SNAKE VENOM. 341 



ribs, giving them a patchy blood-stained appearance. The 

 heart-muscles were also affected, small irregular red patches 

 covering them. The lungs were not visibly damaged. Re- 

 moving the skin from the thigh which the Puff Adders had bitten 

 without apparently producing any poisonous effects, I found the 

 muscles in the vicinity of the punctures to be very much dis- 

 coloured with blood, which had oozed into them. This dis- 

 colouration was traced up, and half-way along the muscles of 

 the ribs on one side. Growing fainter and fainter, it disappeared. 

 It was quite apparent that those Puff Adders had not succeeded 

 in injecting sufficient venom to cause serious symptoms. If the 

 jackal had not been dissected, the extravasated blood would 

 have been absorbed by degrees without any outward symptoms 

 being apparent. An examination of the jackal's stomach and 

 intestines showed them to be perfectly normal. Evidently the 

 copious internal dosing with venom had not produced any ill- 

 effects. 



I kept a half-grown Chacm.a Baboon for four months, which 

 was fed at intervals with Cape Cobra venom. The venom pro- 

 duced no poisonous effects, although it must have swallowed 

 something like a quarter of an ounce of it. However a sub- 

 cutaneous injection of three drops of Cobra poison killed it. 



This is contrary to the published statements in regard to 

 Cobra venom. 



Many people think that experiments on animals arc not 

 satisfactory. They seem to think that the human animal is 

 altogether different in his composition. This is by no means 

 so. The structure of a human being is exactly the same as that 

 of a warm-blooded lower animal (mammal). The mechanism 

 of his body works in the same way in all respects. Like the 

 various species of lower animals, man differs in shape, but that 

 does not alter the fact that he is physiologically the same as they 

 are. Man differs in a physical sense from all lower animals in 

 having a larger and more complex brain. He has evolved 

 faculties of the mind which none of the lower animals possess. 

 True, he has brain organs similar to theirs, but he has added 

 many more which make him what he is. 



