In a paper communicated to this Society I stated that, when, introduced into the stomach of an animal, serpents' venom produces no obvious injury, even when the quantity is so large as to be sufficient to kill 1000 animals of the same species and weight if the venom were injected under the skin. The failure of so highly toxic a substance to produce poisoning when it is administered by the stomach might be due to chemical changes produced upon it by the secretions of the stomach and intestines, or to non-absorbability into the blood from the stomach and intestines. It is already known that the toxicity of venom is not materially reduced by gastric digestion. Although at first sight incompatible with the innocuousness of stomach administration, this fact is not in reality a contradiction of it, for the absorbing power of the stomach for many organic substances—even for strychnine—has been shown to be extremely slight, and their entrance into the circulation appears to occur not in the stomach but in the intestines.

As serpents' venom introduced into the stomach is not rendered innocuous by the stomach secretions, while, notwithstanding, it fails to cause poisoning, it may be assumed that the stomach walls are incapable of absorbing it. If, like other poisons, it can be absorbed from the intestines, the explanation of the failure to produce toxic symptoms when it is administered by the stomach might depend on a chemical or physiological destruction of its toxic properties by some substance or substances which it encounters soon after entering the intestinal canal, and most probably, therefore, by the bile or the pancreatic secretion.