out before, analogy has
been confounded with identity. When a dog, for instance, has been bitten
by a snake he does not usually collapse as quickly as a human being, but
is able to drag himself about much longer before his hind legs refuse
their service and he is unable to walk. This longer duration of the
first stage of the poisoning process is no doubt owing to a higher
organisation and greater functional power of the motor nerve centres of
dogs. The amount of motor force at their disposal is greater, and hence
they offer greater resistance to the invader seeking to turn off this
force. When finally the latter gains the ascendency, irregular
discharges of motor nerve force still take place and find their
expression in convulsions, which in man only exceptionally occur. But
the difference between man and dog becomes more marked yet when
strychnine is administered to a dog suffering from snake-poison. It
counteracts the latter quite as effectually in a dog as in man, but has
to be injected with extreme caution, for whilst in man a slight excess
in the quantity required to subdue the snake-virus is not only harmless,
but actually necessary, any excess of it in a dog will at once produce
violent tetanic convulsions and cause the animal to die even quicker
than the snake-poison would have killed it, if allowed to run its
course. In the face of these facts the judiciousness of the proposal
lately made both here and in India to subject the strychnine treatment
of snakebite once more to a series of test experiments on animals
appears more than questionable.

Another cause that has largely contributed to render experiments on
animals so barren of results must be sought in the injudicious selection
of substances intended to serve as antidotes. It is simply impossible to
act on an organic compound like snake-poison, coursing through a living
system, by chemicals that will either combine with it or decompose it in
a manner likely to deprive it of its deadly qualities and render it
innocuous. Yet what do we find? Acids and alkalis, arsenic, bromides and
iodides, chlorine, mercurial preparations, &c., &c., have been poured
into the luckless animals as if they were so many test tubes. A chemical
antidote, a substance possessing special affinity to snake-poison and by
means of this affinity combining with it in some mysterious and
incomprehensible manner, one can hardy imagine to exist. Physiological
antidotes, on the other hand, sub