The standard book of recipes and housewife's guide, comprising as complete cook book

twenty-four hours ; disturbing the wounded surface each time as little as possible. Before the dressing is reapplied, sprinkle iodoform powder lighih^ over it. This is antiseptic and promotes healing. Penetrating wounds may vary much ; from piercing with a pin to a bayonet, sword, or bullet wound. Even a needle or large pin may be forced into the heart, so as to cause death. Everyone receiving a severe penetrating wound, of any part of the body, must be kept in a condition of complete rest, awaiting results which need to receive the best professional attention, to meet the dangers, seen and unseen, belonging inevitably to such injuries. Poisoned wounds. These are seldom met with, even in war, amongst civilized nations, except by unintended causation. This may happen especially to physicians and surgeons, in their operations, and to medical students in the dissecting-room. Matter from dead bodies, or from diseased living ones, introduced even into the slightest scratch with a knife, needle, or pin, may so taint the blood as to produce a dangerous illness. Not a few physicians have suffered a fatal result from pricking a finger in a post-mortem examination. "To prevent such results (besides care to avoid letting an abraded or punctured part come in contact with morbid matters), as soon as such a thing has happened, the part should be immediately washed and sucked, and then kept out of the way of further danger. In the treatment of poisoned wounds, there is nothing different from that of those which are penetrating or lacerated, unless the wound is made by rabid animals or by venomous serpents. For either of these last, immediate suction is a right precaution ; and at the same time a tight cord around the arm or leg, if either extremity has been bitten : then the end of an iron wire or rod, heated red hot, or a piece of caustic potassa, should be made to burn out the part ; or a pinch of gunpowder may be exploded upon it. All these severe measures are designed to prevent the poison from getting, through the blood-vessels, into the system. Although not more, probably, than one in ten of those bitten by mad dogs have hydrophobia, that one will incurably suffer a dreadful death. POISONS AND THEIR ANTIDOTES Poisons are of several kinds : Animal, as snake-venoms and cantharides : Vegetable, as opium, strychnia, tobacco ; Mineral, as arsenic and corrosive sublimate. But a more useful classification of them is according to their effects : as Depressants, Irritants, Neurotics, and Complex poisons. Depressants are prussic (hydrocyanic) acid, tobacco, lobelia, hemlock, and aconite. It is true, the effects of these, and indeed of almost all poisons, have some complexity ; but their chief effect is depression, sinking, prostration ; which, from a certain dose, is fatal . Irritants are strong acids, as sulphuric, nitric, hydrochloric, oxalic, citric, and tartaric acids ; strong alkalies, as potassa, soda, and ammonia ; phosphorus ; corrosive sublimate ; tartar emetic ; salts of copper ACONITE ROOT. and of zinc ; castor-oil seeds ; colchicum ; croton-oil ; cantharides ; and certain fishes and molluscs (some mussels, etc.). Neurotic poisons either produce stupor, as do opium, chloroform, ether, chloral, hyoscyamus, and camphor (in excessive doses) ; or otherwise damage the nervous