Our secret friends and foes / by Percy Faraday Frankland.

  • Percy F. Frankland
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Our secret friends and foes / by Percy Faraday Frankland. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    with them a native scratches his enemy’s cattle in several places, and although hardly anything ex- ternal is visible, the pointed rodlet penetrates the skin and is broken off, and the poison is thus placed in situ and rapidly does its lethal work. Some of these rodlets were sent to Calmette, and he was able by experiments on animals to prove beyond doubt that the deadly principle they contained was abrine. This substance is highly toxic in character, and very few animals can resist its action to any extent, and this relative immunity is restricted apparently to hedgehogs, fowls, tortoises, frogs and adders. One milligramme of abrine is sufficient to kill a rabbit in forty-eight hours, but it requires a dose of ten milligrammes to destroy a fowl or hedgehog in that time, whilst a tortoise demands as much as thirty milligrammes before it will succumb. Although the same degree of therapeutic in- terest is not attached to the elaboration of an anti-toxin of abrine, its production and study have led in Calmette’s hands to some very interesting results.