HILL — FISH-POISONS. 
229 
ter, but others become deleterious from the food on which 
they subsist at certain seasons on certain banks and coasts. 
Our ensuing observations will be directed to the sanies in- 
dicating disorder in the living tissues of some .fishes, and 
to the poisonous putrifaction or chemical process known ta 
take place in others after they have been a few hours out 
of water. 
There may be such a change effected by mere condition 
of the living tissues in animals, at certain times, as that 
indicated by the conversion of flesh into adipocere. After 
lying in water, meat begins to undergo the adipocerous 
putrifaction, or the conversion of flesh into a substance 
resembling the waxen fat of spermaceti. In the course of 
these changes a poisonous principle develops itself . — ( Chris - 
tison on Poisons, in the London Medical Repository, 1835,/. 
If over-driven cattle, killed before they are allowed to re- 
cover from fatigue, will produce malignant Dysentery, 
what difficulty can there be in accounting for conditions of 
life which may become poisonous to those who eat of what 
is not ordinarily deleterious? No chemical analysis can 
disclose a state in which there is nothing new or extra- 
neous superadded — only a peculiar condition, and relation 
of the ordinary constituents, superinduced. Kreatine which 
is found in the flesh of fishes, is a crystalline substance. It 
never occurs in organised bodies but as the result of some 
abnormal process. The minutest particles of matter in 
organisation — whether saline or earthy, animal or vege- 
table — are combinations always so arranged by the powers 
of life as to be diffused. They are never so concentrated as 
to assume the crystalline form, except when in a state of 
excretion. As a general principle, crystallisation deter- 
