226 OPHIDIANS. 
but upon rising on the morning of the 33d day he experienced, 
to use his own expression, “something like the bursting of a 
fish-bladder,” followed by considerable distinctness of hearing 
in one ear first, and then in the other; on the 45th day after 
ingestion he reported being able to hear as distinctly as he 
ever could in his life. 
This case affords one proof at least of my assertion that the 
action of these galls pathogenetically is a perfect similimum of 
the torical action of their congenital poisons. Let me give 
another in this connection which may not be found devoid of 
interest. 
In the town of Juan de Acosta, nine leagues from Barran- 
quilla, in the State of Bolivar,* in 1870, a countryman was 
bitten by a Vipera Lachesis bufocephalus, and brought into 
the town from his little plantation, together with the snake 
that caused the bite, which he had killed. 
Some one of the bystanders proposed to give him the gall 
of the reptile, adding that this was the remedy which I used 
to cure snake-bites. He assented. The gall-bladder was 
taken from the snake and emptied into three or four ounces 
of common rum (the quantity of pure gall could not have 
been less than from 100 to 150 drops), which was given in a 
single dose. All the pains ceased as if by magic, and in half 
an hour the bitten man said he felt perfectly recovered. An 
hour elapsed; there was a sudden flow of blood from the 
nose, followed by acute darting pains in the bitten limb, and 
a subsequent development of all the toxical symptoms of the 
poison, terminating in death at the lapse of six hours. 
An explanation of the action of the gall in this case was 
undoubtedly the extinction of all the svmptoms of the action 
of the poison in a short time, and then that of the gall became 
* United States of Colombia. 
