CORRESPONDENCE.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VII, Issue 71, 22 March 1872, Page 2

CORRESPONDENCE.

PRESUMED DEATH FROM THE BITE OF A SPIDER. To the Editor of the Nelson Evening Mail. Sic— The gentleman who communicated the paragraph headed as above to your yesterday's issue, shows a very great disrespect to the great law of physics. (i Cause and Effect." He gays, A child, previously in good health, shrieks wiih sudden pain; a spider (of a species known to have inflicted poisonous bites on older individuals) is found on the ehil'i; in the usual time the child shows all the symptoms attributed to poisonous hites and dies—} et he doubts that the bite from the spider was ihe cause of death. Since the account of the child's death appeared in the paper. I have had numerous communications from friends of persons who had suffered from the poisonous bites of s; iders. I will only inflict one on the public. Some years since, a girl, aged y years, was bitten on the. hand by a black spider with red speckles; shortly afterwards the whole hand, arm, and shoulder were so swollen ihat the knuckles and joints were invisible. The girl was then taken to Dr. Renwick, who was then practising, au<i by treatment he relieved it. If this species of spider could so affect a strong healthy girl of 9 years of age, it does not require much scientific knowledge to arrive at the conclusion that its poison was quite snffioient to kill a child of four weeks of age. When the gentleman called upon me to enquire as to the infant's death, he doubted it upon the ground that "he had never heard of a child dying in these colonies from the bite of a spider," whence, I suppose his presumptuous ignoring the great Jaw of " Cause and Kffect." I am, &c, Fbas. L. Vickerman. March 21, 1872. [Dr. Vickerman is fighting a shadow. We have not questioned the fact of the child having died by spider-poisoning. We called it a " presumed death from the bite of a spider." Is it other than this ?— Ed. _V. JS. M ]