e that the mortality
among those bitten by snakes is small here as compared with India,
though the poison of our snakes, quantity for quantity, has been proven
to be quite as deadly as that of the Indian ones. Our greater immunity
is due to our snakes giving off less poison at a bite, and with their
short and (excepting those of the death adder) merely grooved poison
fangs injecting it very superficially, thus making the process of
elimination of the poison by ligature and incision or excision of the
punctures much more easy and successful. It is to this treatment, which,
as a rule; is immediately adopted in the bush, that our small mortality
is due. Our children are taught it in school, and the most illiterate
bushman knows how to carry it out. Where it is omitted by persons not
knowing that they are bitten until the poison has been absorbed recovery
is as rare as it is with the ox and the horse left to themselves without
any treatment. But it requires a prodigious stretch of the logical
faculty to understand what our small mortality from snakebite has to do
with the intrinsic merits of the strychnine treatment. Even if nobody
died at all its effects in doing away with the misery and suffering,
which, before its introduction, invariably followed snakebite, and often
was never got rid of completely, would still be sufficiently beneficial
to render the senseless opposition to it on the part of a small section
of medical men little short of criminal; for these effects are a matter
of constant observation, and cannot, like the rescues from death, be
called into question.

The statistics brought forward to prove that the treatment has not
reduced the death-rate are also most faulty. Until it is thoroughly
understood and in every instance properly applied it is manifestly
foolish as well as unfair to lay non-success and failures at its door.
When a medical man is called upon to treat a serious case, and instead
of boldly addressing himself to the task of combating the symptoms by
injecting the antidote irrespective of the quantity he may require until
it has conquered the snake-poison, becomes nervous and ceases to inject,
when, after what in ordinary practice would be a dangerous dose, he sees
but little effect, or if from the first he injects small doses at long
intervals, the cause of failure surely lies with him and not with the
antidote, which rarely fails where it is properly applied. The duty of
disseminating a sound