Professor Kobert at the University of Dorpat and in that of Professor
Owsjannikow at the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. The
writer's conclusions, on the other hand, resulted entirely from a
careful and happy analysis of the symptoms observed at the bedside of
his patients suffering from snakebite. On one point only, but the most
important one, he differs from Feoktistow. The latter shared the fate of
all previous experimenters on animals. Though his experiments with
snake-poison led him to the correct theory of its action, and even to
the correct antidote, his experiments with strychnine and snake-poison
were a failure. The animals experimented on died, and, falling into the
error of his predecessors, mistaking the functional analogy that exists
between the nerve centres of the lower animals and those of man for
absolute identity, which does not exist, especially not when they are
under the influence of the two poisons, he concluded his researches with
the confession that a physiological antidote for snake-poison cannot
even be thought of at the present state of science. Although,
therefore, Feoktistow's labors would have led to no practical result,
they are, nevertheless, a most valuable contribution to science as being
the first to demonstrate the action of snake-poison on a strictly
scientific, experimental basis. For this reason, and with so high an
authority as Professor Kobert vouching for the correctness of the
experiments, they will be frequently quoted hereafter.

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HISTORICAL REVIEW.

Snakebite and its cure have always been the despair of medical science.
On no other subject has our knowledge remained for centuries so
unsatisfactory, fragmentary and empirical. The history of the subject,
in fact, may be summed up briefly as a series of vain and spasmodic
attempts to solve the problem of snakebite-poisoning and wring from
nature the coveted antidote.

Various and contradictory theories of the action of snake-poison have
been propounded, some absolutely erroneous, others containing a modicum
of truth mixed with a large proportion of error, but none but one
fulfilling the indispensable condition of accounting for all the
phenomena observable during the poisoning process and of reducing the
formidable array of conflicting symptoms to order by finding the law
that governs them all. We have the advocates of the blood-poison theory
ascribing the palpable nerve-symptoms to