INDIAN SNAKE POISONS,
2.20 P.M. Very slight reflex movement.
2.45 P.M. Passing a current through the spinal cord, with interruption produced by means of a key, the muscles of both legs distinctly contracted at 0.5 volt.
2.52 P.M. Spinal cord, mechanically stimulated, gave distinct twitchings in both poisoned and non-poisoned legs.
In all these experiments, as long as the cord possessed power at all, contraction could be excited in either leg provided the nerves had not been mechanically injured, which would rather indicate that the nerves retained their irritability, at the same time that the excitability of the cord was exceedingly quickly lost. Of course a good deal of allowance must be made for the difference; in the method of excitation pursued in the two series of experiments. But though the above experiments go to prove that the excitabihty of the motor nerves lasted as long as that of the spinal cord, yet the difference in the excitability between the two sides in the former experiments showed how powerfully paralysing cobra-poison is. These experiments, then, tend to show that the spinal nervous system is rapidly paralysed by cobra-poison, but that the terminations of the motor nerves only suffer, pari passû, with the cord itself, and the poison has no elective affinity for the ends of the nerves. Nor are the results of the experiments of Sir Joseph Fayrer and Dr. Brunton incompatible with this view. For when one , thigh of the subject of the experiment
