10 HISTORICAL REVIEW. 



treatment on the alleged ground of there not being 

 sufficient evidence before us to justify heroic doses and 

 show them to be safe in practice. When people wil- 

 fully shut theii' eyes against the most conclusive evi- 

 dence, it is improbable that any amount of it would 

 satisfy them. Apart, however, from the fully proven 

 antagonism between the two poisons rendering the 

 large doses of the antidote, which in all serious cases 

 are indispensable^ perfectly safe, the fear of strychnine 

 is, in itself, a very strange aberration of judgment on 

 the part of my opponents, considering how easy it is to 

 counteract any noteworthy excess in its action, if, per- 

 chance, it should occur through unnecessary overdosing, 

 by appropriate remedies. 



All other objections to the treatment require but 

 to be glanced at to show their absurdity. Certain 

 crude experiments on dogs made many years ago in 

 India, and put forward as irrefutable at first, have been 

 abandoned of late, and my learned opponents have now 

 taken up a position in their stronghold of statistics, 

 supposed to be impregnable, but in reality only the 

 last refuge of the destitute, a position from which, by 

 dexterous handling of alleged facts, anything and 

 everything can be proven, in short, to use a strong 

 expression, not my own, a convenient and respectable 

 form of lying. By means of these statistics they try 

 to prove, in the first place, that Australian snake- 

 poison is not at all the insidious death-dealing agent it 

 is supposed to be, since, according to statistics, only 

 126 persons died from it in three colonies within the 



