possible, with scientific progress, we get our modern and significant
expression toxicology as the science of poisons and of poisoning. A
certain grim historical interest gathers around the story of poisons.

It is a history worth studying, for poisons have played their part in
history. The "subtil serpent" taught men the power of a poisoned fang.
Poison was in the first instance a simple instrument of open warfare.
Thus, our savage ancestors tipped their arrows with the snake poison
in order to render them more deadly. The use of vegetable extracts for
this purpose belongs to a later period. The suggestion is not
unreasonable that if war chemists with their powders, their gun
cotton, and their explosives had not been invented, warlike nations
would have turned for their _instrumenta belli_ to toxicologists and
their poisons. At any rate, the toxicologists may claim that the very
cradle of science was rocked in the laboratory of the toxicological
worker. Early in the history of arrow tipping the admixture of blood
with the snake poison became a common practice. Even the use of animal
fluids alone is recorded--e.g., the arrows of Hercules, which were
dipped in the gall of the Lernæan hydra. Hercules himself at last fell
a victim to the blood stained tunic of the dead Centaur Nessus. As
late as the middle of the last century Blumenbach persuaded one of his
class to drink 7 oz. of warm bullock's blood in order to disprove the
then popular notion that even fresh blood was a poison. The young man
who consented to drink the blood did not die a martyr to science.

The first important question we have to answer is, What do we mean by
a poison? The law has not defined a poison, although it requires at
times a definition. The popular definition of a poison is "a drug
which destroys life rapidly when taken in small quantity." The terms
"small quantity" as regards amount, and "rapidly" as regards time, are