As test experiments to confirm observations on man, or made with a view of finding a correct theory of the action of snake-poison, these attempts were unobjectionable, although, without an elaborate scientific apparatus and in other than skilled hands, they were not likely to produce results of any value. But most of the experimenters were not content with purely theoretical aims. They were seeking to find the antidote by a purely empirical method, and had nothing to guide them in the choice of drugs. A dose of snake-poison was administered to an animal, and then a dose of some drug or chemical, chosen _ad libitum_, sent after it. Next day another presumed antidote was tried, another animal slaughtered, and so on _ad nauseam_, until finally the baffled antidote-searcher, not one whit the wiser for all his trouble and the useless tortures inflicted, confessed himself beaten and joined in the "_non possums_" of his predecessors. One important point has been completely left out of sight and ignored in all this experimenting on animals. It is the fact that the action of snake-poison on the human system and on that of animals, more especially dogs, though very similar, is not absolutely identical, and that for this reason alone results of experiments on the latter cannot be indiscriminately applied to man. As pointed out before, analogy has been confounded with identity. When a dog, for instance, has been bitten by a snake he does not usually collapse as quickly as a human being, but is able to drag himself about much longer before his hind legs refuse their service and he is unable to walk. This longer duration of the first stage of the poisoning process is no doubt owing to a higher organisation and greater functional power of the motor nerve centres of dogs. The amount of motor force at their disposal is greater, and hence they offer greater resistance to the invader seeking to turn off this force. When finally the latter gains the ascendency, irregular discharges of motor nerve force still take place and find their expression in convulsions, which in man only exceptionally occur. But the difference between man and dog becomes more marked yet when strychnine is administered to a dog suffering from snake-poison. It counteracts the latter quite as effectually in a dog as in man, but has to be injected with extreme caution, for whilst in man a slight excess in the quantity required to subdue the snake-virus is not only harmless, but actually necessary, any excess of it in a dog will at once produce violent tetanic convulsions and cause the animal to die even quicker than the snake-poison would have killed it, if allowed to run its course. In the face of these facts the judiciousness of the proposal lately made both here and in India to subject the strychnine treatment of snakebite once more to a series of test experiments on animals appears more than questionable.