THE VENOM OF THE AUSTRALIAN BLACK SNAKE. 243 
given in this little book just referred to, and fear that Dr. Martin 
has made a mistake of one decimal place in favour of the Cobra, 
in his calculation, and that the venom of this snake is really less 
powerful than he would lead us to believe, but in a matter of 
arithmetic we are anxious not to insist too strongly. 
A short historical resumé of the chemical work on the poisons 
of snakes from other countries is necessary, in order that the point 
from which we start may be appreciated and our results compared 
with those obtained by the various observers working with other 
species. 
In this resumé we shall not include the historically interesting 
but otherwise unimportant views as to the composition of snake 
venom, held by those pioneers in the subject, Francesco Redi, Dr. 
Mead, Charas, and the Abbé Fontana. Some account of these 
early workers and their contentions is given by Mr. Vincent 
Richards, Chairman of the late Indian Snake Commission, in the 
Landmarks of Snake-poison Literature.’* 
The first investigation into the chemistry of snake poisons of 
_ any importance was by Prince Lucien Bonaparte on the poison of 
an adder (Pelias berus) in 1843. An interesting account of this 
is given by Sir Joseph Fayrer in a paper in the Proc. Med. Soe. 
Lond. 1884. Bonaparte found that the activity of the poison was 
associated with that portion precipitated by alcohol, and he gave 
the name of echidnine or viperine to this precipitate. The result 
of his analysis is stated in the table below—t 
(1) Echidnine or viperine (the active principle) | 
(2) A yellow colouring matter 
(3) A substance soluble in alcohol 
(4) Albumen or mucus 
(5) Fat 
(6) Chlorides and phosphates 
* Landmarks of Snake-poison Literature, Madras, 1886. 
+ For this table we are indebted to a paper by Badaloni--Lancet, 
1883, Vol. 1. 
