ON SERPENT-WORSHIP AND VENOMOUS SNAKES. 117 



centres and the small ganglia in the vaso-motor nerve ends. Extra- 

 vasations of blood around the bite and in the bitten limb, which 

 are very slight after the bite of even the most venomous Australian 

 colubrines, are more conspicuous, and sudden heart failure with 

 consciousness only slightly impaired is much more frequent. Still, 

 even the poison of this snake is purely a nerve poison, as the 

 following case 1 select from a number of similar ones will show. 

 A child of tender age was brought into a Queensland hospital, 

 bitten, a few hours before, by a death-adder. The bitten part had 

 been scarified, and a ligature applied above it. The limb was 

 much swollen, but the child quite conscious. Having to attend 

 an urgent case in another ward the house-surgeon left the child 

 in charge of a nurse, but scarcely ten minutes had elapsed when 

 the father of the child rushed into the ward and informed the 

 surgeon that his son was dead. Surely enough, the boy ap- 

 pealed so on inspection, lying on a bed, livid, limp, and cold, with- 

 out any perceptible pulse or respiration. Strychnine injections 

 combined with artificial respiration were at once resorted to with 

 the result that the child speedily revived and was discharged 

 cured on the following day, showing no sign of blood-poisoning. 

 Granting, however, that death-adder bites cannot be cited as viper 

 bites, since the snake is not strictly speaking a viper, any doubts as 

 to the viperine poison being a nerve-poison or a blood-poison are com- 

 pletely set aside by Feoktistow's experimental researches, which 

 prove most conclusively that the viperine poison is also a pure 

 nerve poison. The correctness of Feoktistow's experiments has 

 been guaranteed to the writer by no less an authority than 

 Professor Kobert, who took an active part in many of them, and 

 kindlv presented to him Feoktistow's brochure, an inaugural dis- 

 sertation, not procurable by the ordinary channel of book-trade. It 

 was published in 1888 after the writer had published his theory of 

 the action of snake poison; and Australian and European researches, 

 whilst arriving at the same conclusions, were carried on simul- 

 taneously but quite independent of each other. 



4 Feoktistow experimented with the poison of Viperidae and 

 Crotalidae only, and drew his supplies of poison from the richly 

 stocked Terraria of the Universities of Dorpat and St. Peters- 

 burg, in which some 200 of these reptiles were kept. His snakes 

 were : Vipera Berns, Vipera Ammodytes and Ci'otalus durissus, 

 and the laboratories of the universities were at his command 

 with the most elaborate of scientific apparatus. In opposing 

 the theory of blood-poisoning, I will only cite one telling 

 experiment. 



5 The whole vascular system of an animal that had received 

 a fatal dose of viperine poison was thoroughly washed out with 

 the warm defibrinised blood of four animals of the same species, 

 not poisoned, the blood being infused into the external jugular 

 vein and allowed to flow out of one of the crural arteries. The 



