was again brought forward. After quantities averaging from half a grain
to a grain have been injected many times in Australia with continuous
success, after Banerjee has even gone as high as three and four grains
in India without a single failure, and without in one single instance
serious strychnine symptoms being evoked, the writer of the paper on
"Snakebite and its Cure" based his principal objection to the treatment
on the alleged ground of there not being sufficient evidence before us
to justify heroic doses and show them to be safe in practice. When
people wilfully shut their eyes against the most conclusive evidence, it
is improbable that any amount of it would satisfy them. Apart, however,
from the fully proven antagonism between the two poisons rendering the
large doses of the antidote, which in all serious cases are
indispensable, perfectly safe, the fear of strychnine is, in itself, a
very strange aberration of judgment on the part of my opponents,
considering how easy it is to counteract any noteworthy excess in its
action, if, perchance, it should occur through unnecessary overdosing,
by appropriate remedies.

All other objections to the treatment require but to be glanced at to
show their absurdity. Certain crude experiments on dogs made many years
ago in India, and put forward as irrefutable at first, have been
abandoned of late, and my learned opponents have now taken up a position
in their stronghold of statistics, supposed to be impregnable, but in
reality only the last refuge of the destitute, a position from which, by
dexterous handling of alleged facts, anything and everything can be
proven, in short, to use a strong expression, not my own, a convenient
and respectable form of lying. By means of these statistics they try to
prove, in the first place, that Australian snake-poison is not at all
the insidious death-dealing agent it is supposed to be, since, according
to statistics, only 126 persons died from it in three colonies within
the last ten years. Further study of these statistics leads them to the
inference that a strong healthy adult will recover from snakebite
_without any treatment_, and thus they finally arrive at the conclusion
aimed at, that persons cured by strychnine injections would probably
have recovered without them. These are the inferences drawn by men, who,
practising in towns, have probably never seen a case of snakebite. How
do they tally with the facts of the case? It is tru