Captain S——, while bathing in a tidal river, felt what he thought was the pinch of a crab on his leg, but took no notice of it, and after his bath called on some friends, being to all appearance exceedingly well. He remained about an hour, playing the concertina to amuse the children, and declaring himself never in better health. In about two hours, feeling strange symptoms of suffocation, enlargement of the tongue, and a rigidity of muscles, he sent for a doctor, but still having no suspicion of danger. The next morning a native detected the peculiar symptoms which usually follow the bite of a sea snake; and Captain S——, then examining the foot which the supposed crab had nipped, found marks of fangs no bigger than mosquito bites on the tendon Achilles near the ankle. Immediate steps were taken, and remedies applied which seemed to promise favourable results for a time; but in the evening of the third day the victim was seized with spasms, and died, seventy-one hours after the accident. In this case, owing to the sound health of the captain, and no local pain ensuing to warn him, together with the stimulants and remedies applied, and the bite being where absorption was slow, his death was protracted; otherwise death often occurs within twenty-four hours from that species of snake.[75] The second case was that of a man who was bitten in the finger by a sea snake, and thinking lightly of it, used no means whatever to arrest the poison, and was dead in four hours. In some cases the victim becomes quickly insensible, when, if no aid is near, he never wakes to consciousness. Immediate stimulants revive the patient, and if he can be kept awake, these, with local applications, _at once applied_, may save his life. ‘Hope itself is a powerful stimulant,’ adds the learned experimentalist. Many other cases are given by Fayrer of bites by sea snakes, some of which yielded to remedies and others were fatal; but for these the reader is referred to the _Thanatophidia_. Dr. Cantor had previously made many experiments on various dumb creatures in order to ascertain the virulence of the poison of these hitherto unstudied reptiles. He found that a fowl died in violent spasms eight minutes after a bite; and a second fowl, bitten directly afterwards by the same snake, with its half-exhausted venom, in ten minutes. Fish died in ten minutes; a tortoise in twenty-eight minutes, from the bite of another species; and a harmless snake was paralyzed within half an hour.