258 



VENOMOUS ANIMALS 



the agglutinated red corpuscles, which finally became invisible when 

 treated with Crotalus- venom. Feoktistow showed that a 2 per 

 cent, solution of the venom of V if era berus destroyed red corpuscles 

 in eighteen to twenty-four hours. Martin has demonstrated also 

 that the venom of Pseudechis in o-i per cent, solution destroyed 

 the red corpuscle. 



Flexner and Noguchi showed that these hcemolysins must be 

 looked upon as amboceptors, which require a complement, and this 

 they obtain in the bactericidal principles found in the serum of the 

 victim. Hence, when they join with the erythrocytes and the 

 complement, they not merely produce haemolysis, but they take 

 away the bactericidal powers from the blood. If, as was found to 

 be the case in Necturus, they are incapable of uniting with the 

 complements, they are incapable of damaging the bactericidal 

 properties of the serum; for it was found that haemolysis was but 

 slightly produced in the blood of Necturus, and then only after 

 long periods, and at the same time the serum of Necturus did 

 not lose its bactericidal effects to Bacillus coli communis and 

 B. typhosus. 



The haemolysins have been further studied by Kyes, who showed 

 that in some animals the venom alone could haemolyze the washed 

 red cells, whereas in others it could not do so until some fresh serum 

 was added. In the first class came man, dog, rabbit, guinea-pig, 

 and horse, and with reference to these he came to the conclusion 

 that the complement was contained in the red blood cell itself 

 — i.e., was an endocomplement. In a further research with Sachs, 

 he shows that this endocomplement is attached to the stroma of 

 the red cells. Further, they conclude that it is the lecithin of the 

 stroma which acts as the complement, and support this by experi- 

 ments showing that lecithin prepared from the yolk of an egg 

 can act as a complement for the venom, and dissolve cells which 

 are not affected by the venom alone. They look upon the 

 fatty acid radical of the lecithin as being probably the active 

 agent. 



In the second class^ — -viz., those animals whose erythrocytes are 

 not affected by venom alone without the presence of serum — come 

 the ox, sheep, and the goat ; but Kyes found it very easy to produce 

 solution by the addition of foreign sera— ^?.g., ox blood by venom 

 and guinea-pig serum; sheep blood by venom and guinea-pig 

 serum- — ^which clearly showed that the venom was an amboceptor, 

 and agreed with the results of Flexner and Noguchi. 



Further, he showed that by heating the serum to 56° C, for half 

 an hour this action was destroyed, but if heated to 65° C. for half 

 an hour haemolysis took place. In other words, serum contained 

 two possible complements: (i) free in the serum, and destroyed by 

 heat; (2) only in heated serum. Kyes and Sachs consider (i) to be 

 complements in the restricted sense of the term, and that there are 

 differences in their workings from that of the lecithin complement. 

 More recently, however, they have doubted this, and begun to 



