The cardiac muscle loses its irritability to stimuli at the time it ceases to beat. The other muscles and nerves respond to irritants. The spinal cord has its power annihilated abruptly, and refuses to respond to the most powerful electrical currents. This virulent heart poison contrasts strongly with serpent venom, since they give rise to local hæmorrhages, causing death chiefly through failure of respiration and not by the heart unless given in overwhelming doses. They lower muscle and nerve reactions, especially those of the respiratory apparatus, but do not cause extreme and abrupt loss of spinal power. They also produce secondary pathological appearances absent in heloderma poisoning. The briefest examination of the lizard's anatomy makes it clear why it has been with reason suspected to be poisonous, and why it poisons with so much difficulty. Unless the teeth are entire, the poison abundant, and the teeth buried in the bitten flesh so as to force it down into contact with the ducts where they open at the crown of the teeth, it is hard to see how even a drop of poison could be forced into the wounds. Yet it is certain that small animals may die from the bite, and this may be due to the extraordinary activity of the poison, and to the lizard's habit of holding tenaciously to what it bites, so as to allow time for a certain amount of absorption. (The provings and the clinical cases that follow were from the virus of the Gila monster obtained by Dr. Charles D. Belden, of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1890, who suggested it as a possible remedy for paralysis agitans and locomotor ataxia. He obtained the virus from a captive monster by irritating it and then letting it strike, or bite, a piece of heavy glass; by this means he obtained a few drops of a pasty yellowish fluid. In his letters Dr. Belden quotes Sir John Lubbock as follows): This animal does not bite frequently, but when it does it is understood that the result is a benumbing paralysis like to paralysis agitans or to locomotor attaxia. There is no tetanic phase, being, as I apprehend, a condition almost reverse in objective symptoms to hydrocyanic acid or strychnia. (Dr. Belden also writes): It seems to me that it (the poison) differs in so many points from all present known venoms that it is worth our having. In the first place it is alkaline, and all other poisons of reptiles are acid. Second, its effect is not always sudden but is lasting--causing sickness for months and death even after a year. Again, although it does not produce paralysis it is not the tonic spasm, but rather the slow creeping death from extremities. It does not seem to excite but to depress.