Venoms: Venomous Animals and Antivenomous Serum-therapeutics

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Mr. E. E. Austen, of the British Museum, has been good enough to undertake the translation of my book on “Venoms.” For the presentation of my work to the scientific public in an English dress I could not have hoped to find a more faithful interpreter. To him I express my liveliest gratitude for the trouble that he has so kindly taken, and I thank Messrs. John Bale, Sons and Danielsson for the care they have bestowed upon the preparation of this edition.
Institut Pasteur de Lille, A. Calmette, M.D. June 17, 1908.
In the month of October, 1891, during the rains, a village in the vicinity of Bac-Lieu, in Lower Cochin-China, was invaded by a swarm of poisonous snakes belonging to the species known as Naja tripudians , or Cobra-di-Capello. These creatures, which were forced by the deluge to enter the native huts, bit four persons, who succumbed in a few hours. An Annamese, a professional snake-charmer in the district, succeeded in catching nineteen of these cobras and shutting them up alive in a barrel. M. Séville, the administrator of the district, thereupon conceived the idea of forwarding the snakes to the newly established Pasteur Institute at Saigon, to which I had been appointed as director.
At this period our knowledge of the physiological action of venoms was extremely limited. A few of their properties alone had been brought to light by the works of Weir Mitchell and Reichard in America, of Wall and Armstrong in India and England, of A. Gautier and Kaufmann in France, and especially by Sir Joseph Fayrer’s splendidly illustrated volume (“The Thanatophidia of India”), published in London in 1872.
An excellent opportunity was thus afforded to me of taking up a study which appeared to possess considerable interest on the morrow of the discoveries of E. Roux and Behring, with reference to the toxins of diphtheria and tetanus, and I could not allow the chance to escape. For the last fifteen years I have been occupied continuously with this subject, and I have published, or caused to be published by my students, in French, English, or German scientific journals, a fairly large number of memoirs either on venoms and the divers venomous animals, or on antivenomous serum-therapeutics. The collation of these papers is now becoming a matter of some difficulty, and it appeared to me that the time had arrived for the production of a monograph, which may, I hope, be of some service to all who are engaged in biological research.