LIVING AMONG SNAKES AND TOADS

Evening Star, Issue 17394, 2 July 1920, Page 7

LIVING AMONG SNAKES AND TOADS

Over the serpents' house in the Jardin des Piantes—the lamous Paris Zoo—Dr Marie Phisalii sits in her laboratory among her suake a and ealamandeis, her little singing toads and grass-green tree frogs, working at her special subject, the presence of poison in reptiles and the medical ,use to which this can be put. " Here," sho said, taking up a lovely newt with the resplendent orange waistcoat which Nature gives him for courting times—"here is a gentleman whose poison is not in a gland provided with a fang, but under his skin," and she explained that this device, if it left him defenceless before his enemy the snake, yst defended his race, since no snake-could eat two newts. He dies of the effects of the first. Mme._ Ph'isallx is the only woman engaged in research work at the Paris Natural History Museum, and she holds a unique position in the scentific world. She took her degree at Sevres Women'* College, and was a professor of natural science in different lycees while preparing to stand for a doctor's degree, which she obtained in 1900 with a thesis on the salamander and poisons from the medical point of view.