Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/480

460 are made of urine and animal fluids, and of the recognition and recovery of poisons from the animal body. This work is supplemented by a lecture course for two years. Realizing the importance of the subject of medical chemistry, the university authorities are contemplating the erection of a new laboratory equipped with every modern appliance and facility for original work. Perhaps the most important contribution from the Laboratory of Physiology since 1879 is the memoir on the Venom of



the Rattlesnake, by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and Dr. Edward T. Reichert, in which it was shown for the first time that the toxic principles of venom are albuminous substances, and this laid the foundation of the enormous amount of work in the development of our knowledge of toxalbumins, etc. The Wistar and Harner Museum, founded nearly a century ago, is the largest and richest of the kind in the United States, containing not only a great variety of specimens illustrating the normal and morbid anatomy of