The Zoologist— October, 1869. 1879 



The above accounts are very vague, and the patients appear to have 

 been walked about for many hours, which after all appears to be 

 the most important point in such cases, although ammonia has been 

 known for many years past as a valuable means for maintaining circu- 

 lation when feeble. 



" Antidote for Snake-Poison, by Col. C. L. Shavers. — A report being 

 made to me that a woman living in a village adjoining the Residency 

 had been bitten by a snake, and was dying, I sent for the Residency 

 surgeon, and walked over myself at once, attended by a servant with 

 brandy, in the hope of being able to afford assistance. On arriving 

 at the scene of the accident, I found the woman seated on the ground 

 outside the door of her hut, under a sort of improvised porch formed 

 of branches and leaves, which the villagers had erected at the moment 

 to afford the woman air, without exposure to the sun. She was suffer- 

 ing from a succession of swooning fits, having already had eight pre- 

 viously to my arrival, in the interval of about two hours since she was 

 billen. The marks of the bite were distinctly visible on her ankle. 

 While waiting for the surgeon one of the swooning fits recurred : the 

 method resorted to by two men who were treating her was what is 

 known amongst natives by the term " Jharnaphookna," or to exercise. 

 I had never witnessed it before ; it was a strange and painful spec- 

 tacle. As soon as indications of the approaching swoon appeared, 

 and the woman fell forward from her sitting position insensible, one of 

 the two men seized her head across the forehead and temples with 

 one hand, the other hand supporting the head behind, and then com- 

 menced shouting some ' muntras,' or charmed verses, into her eai-, 

 at the very top of his voice ; the other man, seated on the other side, 

 taking up the last note of each cadence, and prolonging it with an 

 indescribable howl with his mouth close to her ear. After this had 

 been continued for some minutes without any sign of returning con- 

 sciousness, the man who was supporting the woman by the head com- 

 menced shaking her violently and slapping and raising her, vocifer- 

 ously, in apparent anger at her obstinacy : after some time this had 

 the desired effect, as slowly, with convulsive gasps and other symp- 

 toms of distress, she came to herself. In the interval a man had 

 arrived on the scene, who at once assumed — and was tacitly allowed 

 by the bystanders to do so — the treatment of the case. He quietly 

 put aside the charmers, reassured the woman and her relatives, with 

 an air of perfect confidence as to the safety of her life, and pounding 



