He was called early one morning to visit a little boy, two years old, and on examination found that he presented symptoms almost identical with those of snakebite poisoning. Although there was no evidence of the child having come in contact with a snake, the writer naturally concluded that during the night a snake had obtained access to the bedroom through the open door or window, and after biting the child sleeping in its low cot, had escaped again. He therefore searched most carefully for the usual two punctures, but they were not to be found. The child evidently laboured under the effect of some poison, and spiderbite suggested itself, but the symptoms were so much more aggravated than anything the writer had frequently seen of spiderbite that he hesitated to accept it as the cause, although it appeared almost the only possible one. A careful inquiry into the history of the case elicited from the mother the important fact that on the previous afternoon the little fellow, just able to toddle about, had gradually lost the use of his legs, and also become very peevish, and that suspecting nothing but a little temporary indisposition, she had put him to bed, to find him in the morning all but dead. He was scarcely breathing when the writer saw him, and only the stethoscope gave evidence of the heart still beating feebly. His body was very cold, pupils widely dilated, and the sight even apparently gone, the eyes wide open, staring fixedly upwards and not noticing a lighted match in closest proximity to them. Consciousness also appeared extinct, as liquids introduced into the mouth were not swallowed. Examining once more for traces of spiderbite in the skin, the writer noticed faint red stripes extending up the arm from a little cut on the right index finger near the nail, and on inquiry it was ascertained at last from an elder brother that he had seen the child pick up a little black spider with a red back, hold it for some time between thumb and index finger, and then throw it away. This was evidently the Katipo (_Latrodectus icelio_), the poison of which acts on the same principle as snake-poison, but generally much milder. The greater severity of its action in this case was accounted for by the mandibles having been inserted into the cut, and the insect, being squeezed by the child, having emptied the whole available contents of its poison gland into the cellular tissue exposed in the cut, whence it was quickly absorbed. This also accounted for the absence of all irritation and of the neuralgic pains usually accompanying spiderbite, when the mandibles merely perforate the epidermis and the poison is deposited in the upper cutis, where absorption is slow and local irritation consequently greater.