92 On the Condition of the Blood 
symptoms and post-mortem appearances in severe cases of 
cholera and snake-poisoning are nearly identical, they may 
have a kindred origin. Certainly the facts before us urge 
us to a further and searching examination of the blood in 
cholera. If the cells described by Dr. Cowan should again 
and always be found, the probability of animal poison 
as the cause of cholera would be greatly strengthened.* 
This may provoke a smile. I put it forth as hypothesis, 
perhaps fanciful hypothesis, and yet if we consider that the 
dried poison of the cobra has been kept for ten years and 
then destroyed life by imoculation, and remember that the 
home of cholera and of the cobra and other venomous 
reptiles is India, and that millions of reptiles die yearly, 
and that as pollen is carried from place to place by insects, 
so may this dried poison be, or carried into the upper 
currents of the air, and subsequently inhaled—for the 
lung has no thick cuticle to be pierced, and therefore no 
poison-fang is needed—and kill a man ina little more. than 
five minutes, or if not kill so soon, in addition to the 
gradual robbing of animal heat, produce by its presence in 
the capillaries of the muscular system those fearful cramps 
that follow the cold stage and the post-mortem movements 
before alluded to.t I say, if we consider these things, 
coupled with the total darkness in which we dwell respect- 
ing the origin of this fearful disease, the smile that at first 
it is impossible to repress soon passes away, and we are 
driven to think seriously of the presence of some animal 
poison at least. I do not think this hypothesis more un- 
reasonable than that some years ago put forward by one 
of our most eminent writers, viz, Sir Henry Holland, 
“which looks to animalcule life, diffused by the atmosphere 
or by man, as the source of the disease—a form of life not 
cognizable by our senses, or other present means of research, 
but nevertheless producing a virus which acts noxiously or 
fatally on the body of man.” ; 
Time will not permit me to say more than just allude to 
the probability of yellow-fever and most zymotice diseases 
* By some it may be asked, May not these have been vegetable cells ? 
Indeed, the line of demarcation between animal and vegetable organisms is 
becoming daily less definable, and it is even said that rapidly-growing 
fungi play the part of animal cells, z.e., absorb the organic matters on which 
they grow, and yield up carbonic acid. 
+ Some people, arguing about infection, speak as though poisons were 
dissolved in the atmosphere, and everybody must inhale them, whereas they 
are suspended or diffused, whereby A may be infected and B may not. 
