Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 126, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 December 1909 — Poison Man’s Best Friend. [ARTICLE]

Poison Man’s Best Friend.

Strangely anomalous as It may appear the existence of active poisons In the animal vegetable and mineral kingdoms of nature has done more for the development of modern dYlllzed man than have all the other Innocuous elemental things which aboriginal man found to his hand, says the Technical World. These active poisons were man's first stimulus to first adaption of poison to the uses of man. The aborigine found himself at <once the hunter and the hunted of creation. Whether as hunter or the hunted, he> was a pygmy compared with many of the carnivorous beasts of his environment. He saw that whereas his own considerable physical force and power were as nothing to some of these creatures, the fang of the serpent was allcompelling. Where the poisonous serpent struck with poisoned fang and killed Its quarry, he Baw It sat without discomfort or Injury. To kill his own food through the venom of the serpent must have Wen on* of man’s first elaborated mental processes. As this aborigine applied the venom of the serpent to bi* arrow, and later blended it with the poisons of tbs vsgstabl# world, he may be said to have grown in mental atatunn.