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. [Illustration] 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 imaginary blood changes produced by the subtle poison, and alleged to have been discovered by the willing, but frequently deceiving microscope. Even bacteriology has been laid under service and innocent leucocytes have been converted under the microscope into deadly germs, introduced by the reptile, multiplying with marvellous rapidity in the blood of its victims, appropriating to themselves all the available oxygen and producing carbonic acid, as the saccharomyces does in alcoholic fermentation. Others again, and among them those supposed to be the highest authorities on the subject now living, divide the honors between nerve and blood. Some snakes they allege are nerve-poisoners others as surely poison the blood, but with one solitary exception they assume the terminations of the motor-nerves and not the centres to be affected. Thus then with regard to theories we have hitherto had "confusion worse confounded," and as with theories so it has been with antidotes. They were proposed in numbers, but only to be given up again, some intended to decompose and destroy the subtle poison in the system, others to counteract its action on the system with that action unknown. It is scarcely too much to assert that there are but few chemicals and drugs in the materia medica that have not been tried as antidotes in experiments on animals and dozens upon dozens that have been tried in vain on man.