HISTORICAL REVIEW. 11 



last ten years. Further study of these statistics leads 

 them to the inference that a strong healthy adult will 

 recover from snakebite without any treatment, and thus 

 they finally arrive at the conclusion aimed at, that 

 persons cured by strychnine injections would probably 

 have recovered without them. These are the infer- 

 ences drawn by men, who, practising in towns, have 

 probably never seen a case of snakebite. How do 

 they tally with the facts of the case ? It is true that 

 the mortality among those bitten by snakes is small 

 here as compared with India, though the poison of our 

 shakes, quantity for quantity, has been proven to be 

 quite as deadly as that of the Indian ones. Our 

 greater immunity is due to our snakes giving off less 

 poison at a bite, and with their short and (excepting 

 "those of the death adder) merely grooved poison fangs 

 injecting it very superficially, thus making the process 

 of elimination of the poison by ligature and incision 

 or excision of the punctures much more easy and 

 successful. It is to this treatment, which, as a rule, 

 is immediately adopted in the bush, that our small 

 mortality is due. Our children are taught it in school, 

 and the most illiterate bushman knows how to carry 

 it out. Where it is omitted by persons not knowing 

 that they are bitten until the poison has been absorbed 

 recovery is as rare as it is with the ox and the horse 

 left to themselves without any treatment. But it 

 requires a prodigious stretch of the logical faculty to 

 understand what our small mortality from snakebite 

 has to do with the intrinsic merits of the strychnine 



