Snake Poison

Abstract

TOUCHING the effect of Crotalus venom on vegetable life, I am anxious to repair an error which appears on p. 552 of my work on “Snakes”, where Dr. Mitchell is made to affirm that some healthy vegetables inoculated with the poison were “withered and dead next day, as if scathed by lightning”. In some notes which I made many years ago on a too cursory reading of Dr. Mitchell's paper,¹ I omitted the inverted commas, which denote that the experiment was tried by Dr. Gillman of St. Louis, in 1854, but which Dr. Mitchell thought was too limited and wanting in detail to be of scientific value. I had overlooked Dr. Mitchell's comments and his own experiments on vegetable life, by which he was driven to the conclusion that the plants were injured by mechanical wounds, and not by the venom inserted into them. When writing my chapter under pressure of time long afterwards, I trusted too confidently to those careless notes, and to an impression gained through the old Virginia writers that venom is injurious to vegetable life.