nor the nerve centres respond to
them in the slightest degree, as they do in the absence of snake-poison,
the only one that has any effect at all in slight cases being ammonia.
But the attempt is not only in vain, it is highly injurious, especially
if made with the usual large doses of alcohol, for, in addition to the
latter not having the slightest influence on the snake-poison and its
baneful effects, they act as an anaesthetic and thus add to the existing
depression, besides increasing the tendency to internal haemorrhage.

It might, under these circumstances, have been expected that any new
method of treating snakebite, based on scientific grounds and holding
out a sure prospect of success, would be hailed with pleasure, and that
conservatism, opposing the new simply on account of its newness, would
refrain from its usual tactics in a case where there was really nothing
to conserve. But this was not to be, and strange, indeed, it would have
been if the writer had escaped the opposition which is almost invariably
offered to the discoverer. It appears to be one of the laws of human
evolution, wisely designed to prevent precipitate advance, that every
new discovery must run the gauntlet of men whose mission it is to act as
brakes on the wheels of progress. Of the opposition which has been
offered to the strychnine treatment it would, therefore, be folly to
complain, but just cause of complaint is furnished by the unscientific
attitude which was assumed from the very first and has been maintained
throughout by its opponents.

Not a single attempt has been made to disprove the correctness of the
theory on which it is founded, yet to leave this theory unquestioned but
object to the conclusion to which it leads, must strike even the lay
mind as a most illogical proceeding. It is self-evident that, when
strychnine is administered as an antidote to snake-poison, the quantity
of it injected must be in proportion to that of snake-venom present in
the system, and that the doses in which we dispense it in ordinary
practice must be entirely left out of sight. Still, in the face of these
obvious conclusions, we have had veterans, grave and grey, arguing
pompously that the heroic doses advocated by the writer could not be
countenanced, and that even medical men could not be entrusted with the
serious task of administering them. Even as late as the last medical
congress at Sydney this absurd objection to large doses of the antidote