collapse, and from the combined effects of this and heart failure death
takes place suddenly and quickly as if in a fainting fit. Here then we
have an approach to the effects of viper poison which is also shown in
the greater amount of swelling and effusion around the bite and in the
bitten limb.

This approach is still closer in the poison of the death adder
(_Acantophis antarctica_). There is generally much extravasation of
blood locally. Muscular paralysis is also less pronounced, but sudden
collapse from vaso-motor paralysis not unfrequently takes place, when
the patients fully conscious are still able to sit up. That leading
feature of viper poison, diapedesis with haemorrhage, does not occur with
either.

If we turn from Australian to Indian snakes, the peculiar tendency of
the poison to concentrate its action on special nerve-centres becomes
still more marked. The predilection of the cobra poison for the
respiratory centre has already been dwelt on. More remarkable and
strange is the action of the Indian viper-poison on the minute ganglia
in the vaso-motor nerve ends, which control the capillary circulation,
and by their paralysis bring about extensive haemorrhage through
diapedesis.

It is quite impossible for us with our present scanty knowledge to
account for these peculiarities and irregularities in the action of a
poison, which we know now to accomplish its destruction of animal life
by one uniform design and principle of action. That the protean forms
under which the poison-symptoms present themselves are one and all the
result of reduction and suspension of motor nerve currents may now be
accepted as a well proven and fully established scientific fact. But why
the effects of one and the same cause are so varying in their
appearance, why the poison of different varieties of snakes, and even
that of the same variety under different circumstances, make such a
capricious selection among the various motor nerve-centres we can not
explain and probably never will. Chemical analysis of the dead poison,
no matter how minutely and elaborately it may be effected, will probably
never throw much light on the "why" of this strange puzzle, for the
subtle phenomena of life are apt to elude the grasp of the analyst. We
have to do with a poison transferred from one living organism into
another one and modified in its action by the condition of the giver and
the constitution and peculiarities of the recipient quite as m