PEEsident's address. 217 



Here also fatal tetanus supervened. It surely is not too much 

 to hope that with our present knowledge of its pathology cures 

 may be effected, at any rate in some of the less severe cases of 

 this dreadful complaint. It seems certain that the poisoned 

 arrows used by savages owe their lethal effects to an earth- 

 poison, and that the symptoms they produce are usually tetanic 

 in character. Bishop Patteson and Commodore Goodenough died 

 in this way, and Dr. Ledantic gives the following interesting 

 description of the arrows : " They are about three feet in length ; 

 the shaft is made of a reed, then comes a middle portion com- 

 posed of hard wood, and lastly a point which is usually composed 

 of a fragment of human bone, which is carefully sharpened to a 

 very fine point, and is so fixed that it readily snaps off on the 

 slightest shock. "With a sticky substance obtained from an in- 

 cision made in the bark of a tree, the point composed of the 

 fragment of bone is smeared. This fluid, on exposure to the 

 air, becomes thicker and of a more viscid consistence. Thread 

 is then wound in a spiral direction round and round the sticky 

 point. A quantity of soil from the edge of a mangrove-swamp 

 is taken in a cocoa-nut shell, or some similar vessel, and into 

 this the arrow-head is plunged. It is then carefully dried in 

 the sun, after which the thread is removed, when a roughened 

 point covered with a film of dry mud and dust is left. In this 

 mud there are probably both septic vibrios and tetanus bacilli ; 

 the former, however, are rapidly killed by exposure to the sun, 

 whilst the tetanus bacillus of Nicobaier, which developes a well- 

 formed spore at one extremity, may remain active for months 

 and even years, although, as the savages well know, the poison 

 generally becomes more and more attenuated, until old arrows 

 are known to become entirely inoffensive, except as mere me- 

 chanical weapons of warfare or hunting."* 



To bring before you, even in the most superficial manner, 

 anything like a complete account of recent researches amongst 

 Bacteria, or even to epitomize the more interesting amongst such 

 observations, would lead me far beyond the limits which can be 

 allowed to this already too long address. 



* Woodhead; Bacteria and their Products, pp. 294, 295. 



