of an ignorant teaching and vulgar prejudice that feeds and clothes the charlatan and ascribes to savage and uncultured races an occult familiarity with pathological, physiological, and remedial effect unattainable by the most advanced sciences; and whereby the Negro, Malay, Hindoo, South Sea Islander, and red man are granted an innate knowledge of poisons and their antidotes more than miraculous.  A reward of more than a quarter of a century’s standing, and amounting to several thousand pounds, is offered by the East India Government for the discovery of a specific for the bite of the cobra, and for which no claims have ever been advanced; and the “snake charmers” or jugglers in whom this superior knowledge is supposed to center are so well aware of the futility of specifics, and the risk to which they are subjected, that few venture to ply their calling without a broad-bladed, keen-edged knife concealed about the person as a means of instant amputation in case of accident.  Medical and scientific associations of various classes, in Europe, Australia, America, even Africa, and the East and West Indies, have repeatedly held out the most tempting lures, and indulged in exhaustive and costly experimentation in search of specifics for the wounds of vipers, cobras, rattlesnakes, and the general horde of venomous reptiles; and all in vain.  Even the saliva of man, as well as certain other secretions, is at times so modified by anger as to rival the venom of the serpent in fatality, and it has no specific; and a careful analysis of the pathological relations of such poison proves that further experimentation and expectation is as irrational as the pursuit of the “philosopher’s stone.”

It is an indisputable fact, however, that there are individuals whose natural or acquired idiosyncrasies permit them to be inoculated by the most venomous of reptiles without deleterious or unpleasant results, and Colonel Matthews Taylor[7] knew several persons of this character in India, and who regarded the bite of the cobra or tic paloonga with nearly as much indifference as the sting of a gnat or mosquito.  Again, in 1868, Mr. Drummond, a prominent magistrate of Melbourne, Australia,[8] met with untimely death under circumstances that attracted no little attention.  An itinerant vender of nostrums had on exhibition a number of venomous reptiles, by which he caused himself to be successively bitten, professing to secure immunity by reason of a secret compound which he offered for sale at a round figure.  Convinced that the fellow was an imposter, and his wares valuable only as a means of depleting the pockets of the credulous, Mr. Drummond loudly asserted the inefficacy of the nostrum, as well as the innocuousness of the reptiles, which he assumed to be either naturally harmless, or rendered so by being deprived of their fangs; and in proof thereof insisted upon being himself bitten.  To this experiment the charlatan was extremely averse, offering strenuous