It has been shown by experiment that many of the lower animals, as well as man, are dependent for their life on salt in their blood. "When an animal is fed with a diet as far as possible free from salts, but otherwise sufficient, it dies of _salts-hunger_. The blood first loses inorganic material, then the organs. The total loss is very small in proportion to the quantity still retained in the body; but it is sufficient to cause the death of a pigeon in three weeks, and of a dog in six, with marked symptoms of muscular and nervous weakness."[45] A mode of torture in former ages is said to have been to deprive a person of salt, and cause him to waste away with painful salt-hunger. It is said that this mode of torture is still employed in China. [45] Voit, cited in Stewart's _Manual of Physiology_, Baillière, Tindall, and Cox, 1895. An Armenian story says that when a band of their people was in a stronghold of the mountains, and was besieged by the Turks, the latter failing to subdue the former by other means cut off the supply of salt from the Armenians, and this quickly subdued them. In 1830, a paper by Dr. W. Stevens, read before the London College of Physicians, and afterwards elaborated and published in a volume, contended that the salient ingredients of the blood, "the chief of which is common culinary salt, ... is the cause of the red color, of the fluidity, and of the stimulating property, of the vital current." Dr. Stevens claimed that the poison of the rattlesnake, and various other poisons, operate directly on the blood, and produce disease or death "by interfering with the agency of the saline matter."[46] [46] See _London Quarterly Review_, XLVIII., 96 (Dec., 1832, 375-391). "On the subject of the poison of the rattlesnake," Dr. Stevens, in this work, asserts that "when the muriate of soda (common salt) is immediately applied to the wound, it is a complete antidote. 'When an Indian,' he says, 'is bitten by a snake, he applies a ligature above the part, and scarifies the wound to the very bottom; he then stuffs it with common salt, and after this it soon heals, without producing any effect on the general system.'" In view of the fact that it might be objected that the salt is not the essential means of cure, but is an addition to the curative treatment, Dr. Stevens says that he has "seen a rabbit, that was under the influence of the rattlesnake poison, drink a saturated solution of muriate of soda with great avidity, and soon recover; while healthy rabbits would not taste one drop of the same strong saline water when it was put before them."