6 HISTORICAL REVIEW. 



Another cause that has largely contributed to 

 render experiments on animals so barren of results 

 must be sought in the injudicious selection of sub- 

 stances intended to serve as antidotes. It is simply 

 impossible to act on an organic compound like snake- 

 poison, coursing through, a living system, by chemicals 

 that will either combine with it or decompose it in a 

 manner likely to deprive it of its deadly qualities and 

 render it innocuous. Yet what do we find? Acids 

 and alkalis, arsenic, bromides and iodides, chloriue, 

 mercurial preparations, &c., &c., have been poured 

 into the luckless animals as if they were so many test 

 tubes. A chemical antidote, a substance possessing 

 special affinity to snake-poison and by means of this 

 affinity combining with it in some mysterious and 

 incomprehensible manner, one can hardly imagine to 

 exist. Physiological antidotes, on the other hand, 

 substances acting on the system in a manner the 

 exact reverse of, and in direct antagonism to the 

 snake-poison^ though apparently the only feasible ones, 

 have been strangely neglected and almost despised by 

 experimenters. 



In the vast storehouse of Nature the department 

 most likely to furnish such antidotes is the vegetable 

 kingdom. The untutored human mind has for 

 centuries past intuitively clung to this idea, and sought 

 among plants for remedies against the deadly ophidian 

 poison. Hence the great number of vegetable anti- 

 dotes that have from time to time been recommended 

 and the efficacy of some of which at least has been 



