NATURE AND ANALYSIS OF THE POISONS. 137 
The poison and the fang by which it injects it are the rep- 
tile’s weapons of defence, consequently nature does not teach it 
to use'them against its own kind, so it may bite another snake 
without injecting poison into the wound ; whereas, if it bites 
a man or an animal the injection of the virus follows, an in- 
stinct of nature. A knowledge of the foregoing facts leads 
us to the following conclusions, viz.: 
Ist. To determine the nature of any of these poisons by 
experiment we must first be sure that they are taken from a 
reptile at the period during which the venomous principle is 
fully developed. 
2d. A hypodermic syringe is the proper instrument to be 
relied on for introducing the virus into the blood, as its action 
is precisely similar to that of the fang. 
3d. We must be sure that there has been no general absorp- 
tion of bile into the system of the animal to be experimented 
upon, at the time of making the experiment. 
By observing all these conditions, our experiments will be 
of value to science. 
The experiments of Blake, Hering, and Claud Bernard, 
show that the absorption of the poison takes place with such 
rapidity as to render the administration of any remedy utterly 
useless in many cases. The general rule is, that an antidote 
will prove efficacious in all cases where no organic lesion has 
already taken place. 
In South America the bite of a Vipera Echis variegata 
has been known to produce death in five minutes in a man; 
and a Vipera Lachesis nigcr has killed a stout, able-bodied 
man in as short a period of time. 
Blake says* poison passed through the jugular vein to the 
lungs of a dog in from 4 to 6 seconds; through the jugular 
* Guy’s Forensic Medicine, page 888, third edition. 
12 
