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 much probably as by slight variations in its chemical composition. Accepting the "why" of these phenomena like that of many other ones, simply as a fact not to be accounted for at present, we must be content to know "how" they are effected, and, what is of more immediate and paramount importance to know, that we now have an antidote that will deal successfully with them all, that the convulsions and hæmorrhages of the Indian viper-poison and the asphyxia of that of the cobra will yield as readily to strychnine, when properly and boldly applied, as the coma and general paralysis following the bite of the deadly tiger snake. [Illustration] THE ANTIDOTE. The theory of the action of snake-poison as that of a specific nerve-poison, depressing and more or less suspending the function of the motor nerve-centres throughout the body, has in the foregoing pages received a double proof of its correctness. In the first place, all the symptoms the snake-poison produces have been passed in review, and shown to be fully explainable by this theory. On this ground alone it may be claimed to have been fully established; for it is an axiom in science that a theory on any subject must be accepted as correct, if it accounts satisfactorily for all the phenomena observable in connection with that subject by showing them to result from the operation of one law. The second inductive proof of the correctness of the writer's theory has been rendered by the experiments of Feoktistow on animals.