HISTORICAL REVIEW. 



applied to man. • As pointed out before, analogy has 

 been confounded with identity. When a dog, for 

 instance, has been bitten by a snake he does not 

 usually collapse as quickly as a human being, but is 

 able to drag himself about much longer before his hind 

 legs refuse their service and he is unable to walk. This 

 longer duration of the first stage of the poisoning process 

 is no doubt owing to a higher organisation and greater 

 functional power of the motor nerve centres of dogs. 

 The, amount of motor force at their disposal is greater, 

 and hence they oflFer greater resistance to the invader 

 seeking to turn off this force. When finally the latter 

 gains the ascendency, irregular discharges of motor 

 nerve force still take place and find their expression in 

 convulsions, which in man only exceptionally occur. 

 But the difference between man and dog becomes more 

 marked yet when strychnine is administered to a dog 

 suffering from snake-poison. It counteracts the latter 

 quite as effectually in a dog as in man, but has to be 

 injected with extreme caution, tor whilst in man a 

 slight excess in the quantity required to subdue the 

 snake-virus is not only harmless, but actually neces- 

 sary, any excess of it in a dog will at once produce 

 violent tetanic convulsions and cause the animal to die 

 even quicker than the snake-poison would have killed 

 it, if allowed to run its course. In the face of these 

 facts the judiciousness of the proposal lately made both 

 here and in India to subject the stiychnine treatment 

 of snakebite once more to a series of test experiments 

 on animals appears more than questionable. 



