THE PHYSIOLOGY OF POISONING 181 



C. J. Martin, in experimenting upon rats with the veuom of 

 PseMc?ec/«s (CoLUBRiDiE), has succeeded in keeping these animals 

 alive for a whole week by providing them every day with a ration 

 of Tjiread and milk mixed with a dose of venom one hundred 

 times greater than the lethal dose for a subcutaneous injection. 

 This innocuousness of the venoms of Colubuid^e, which I have 

 frequently been able to establish by causing them to be ingested by 

 different animals, is explained by the fact that the pancreatic juice 

 and the ptyalin of the saliva very rapidly modify the proteic sub- 

 stances to which these venoms owe their toxicity, so that this 

 disappears. No trace of them is found in the faeces. 



The glandular secretions of persons bitten by venomous snakes, 

 and those of animals inoculated with doses of venom calculated 

 to kill only after a few hours, are not infrequently found to be 

 toxic. In the case of the urine in particular this has been shown 

 to be so. 



Observations have also been recorded by G. Francis^ and Sir 

 Joseph Fayrer with reference to the passage of venom through the 

 mammary gland. In the year 1893 a poor Mussulman woman died 

 at Madras from the bite of a Cobra. She was nursing her child 

 at the time, and the latter succumbed in its turn a few hours later, 

 with all the symptoms of poisoning, although it had not itself been 

 bitten, and had been suckled by its mother only once since the 

 bite. 



The histological lesions produced by snake poisoning have been 

 particularly well studied by Hindale,^ Karlinski,' Nowak,* Louis 

 Vaillant-Hovius,' and Zeliony.'^ 



■ Indian Annals, July, 1868. 



- Medical News, Philadelphia, 1884. 



' " Zur Pathologie des Schlangenbisses," Forsclimigen der Medicin, Berlin, 



1890. 



*Annales de I'Institut Pasteur, t. xii., 1898, p. 369. 



5 These Bordeaux, 1902. 



° Virchow's Archivfiir Pathologie, Anatomie, und Physiologie, Band 179, 1905. 



