POISON OF SOME INDIAN VENOMOUS SNAKES. 19 



As the blood is tlie channel through which the poison acts, it 

 is obvious that the first object should be to arrest, destroy, or 

 prevent its entry into the circulation; or if it has already 

 entered, to neutralise or counteract its action, or to procure its 

 elimination by the agency of the natural depurating organs and 

 their secretions, and to treat local, consecutive, and constitutional 

 symptoms by such remedial measures as may be required by 

 the patient's condition. 



Absorption takes place with extreme rapidity, so fast, indeed, 

 that it was formerly supposed, in the case of some of the more 

 active poisons, that they acted by transmission of a shock 

 through the nervous system ; and, so far as we know at present, 

 it is not improbable that such, in some instances, may be the 

 case. But rapid as the effect of snake-bite sometimes is, there 

 is no reason to believe that generally it operates on the nerve- 

 centres through any other channel that that of the vascular 

 system. The experiments of Blake, Hering, and, later, of 

 Claude Bernard show that absorption takes place with such 

 rapidity as to explain the most rapid deaths from such cause. 

 Blake {vide Guy's Forensic Medicine, 3rd edition, p. 388) found 

 that a poison passed from the jugular vein to the lungs of a 

 dog in from four to six seconds, from the jugular vein to the 

 coronary arteries of the heart in seven seconds; a poison 

 injected into the jugular vein was distributed throughout the 

 circulation in nine seconds. Claude Bernard found that a 

 saturated solution of sulphuretted hydrogen introduced into 

 the jugular vein of a dog began to be eliminated from the lungs 

 in three seconds, and when injected into the femoral vein of the 

 same dog in six seconds. 



We have neither seen nor heard of any case of snake- 

 poisoning, in man or the lower animals, so rapid (though in 

 some Dr. Fayrer has observed the first symptoms in a few 

 seconds) as to justify the conclusion that poisoning had 

 occurred otherwise than through the medium of the circulation. 

 Some preliminary experiments made in England by one of 



coagulate. This is a point tliat needs muoli further and repeated observation, 

 as, indeed, does the question of the chemistry of the blood of animals affected 

 b}- snake-poison, and we hope to report further on it. 



(95) c 2 



