[133] According to the Apotheker Zeitung, No. 14, April 3, 1879, out of 118 samples of children’s toys officially examined in 1878, 53, or nearly one-half, were found adorned with poisonous colours. In the cases of 46 the vendors were punished. As to dresses, see Chem. News, v. 114.
[134] In the case of Maria Gage, tried at the Summer Assizes, at Ipswich, on the 2nd of August, 1851, for the murder of her husband, it was proved that she had got a neighbour to purchase for her a pennyworth of stuff for rats and mice, which was found to consist of linseed with arsenic enough to kill half a dozen men.
[135] “Considerable sensation has been excited by the report that arsenic had been detected in the paper collars, &c., manufactured by a Leipzig firm. On a careful examination, conducted by six of the most eminent chemists, the accusation was proved to be utterly unfounded.”—Chemiker Zeitung, No. 45, 1879.
[136] In this case, which was tried in April, 1835, before Sir Charles Wetherell, as Recorder of Bristol, a widow lady of the name of Mary Smith, who had lodged with the prisoner, was poisoned by her, in October, 1833, for the sake of the money and other property she had with her. The accused was proved to have purchased yellow arsenic about six days before Mrs. Smith’s death, and to have been seen putting some yellow powder out of a paper from her pocket into a basin of gruel, after taking which Mrs. Smith was seized with dreadful convulsions, and died. In consequence of suspicions created by the prisoner’s subsequent conduct and false statements, a post-mortem was held of the body, exhumed fourteen months after death. The report of this examination was very striking. “A thick, yellow coating, like paint, lay on the mucous membrane of the stomach, particularly over the pyloric third, but it extended more or less with some small interjections of unstained membrane to within two or three inches of the great cul-de-sac.” The accused was convicted and executed.
[137] Phosphates give nothing with sulphuretted hydrogen, and a yellow with silver nitrate.
[138] “A curious toxicological case is reported from Hamburg. The body of a man who died in 1867 was taken for examination. It was thought necessary to determine arsenic, not merely in the corpse in question, but in the soil of the churchyard at different distances from the coffin, and also in the body of another man who had been subsequently buried in the same grave. This latter body was perfectly free from arsenic, which, however, was found in the first corpse in ample fatal quantity (3·6 grains), whilst in the lid of the coffin and in the adjacent ground very minute quantities were traced. Hence the conclusion was fairly drawn that the man in question had been poisoned with arsenic, and that a portion of the poison had been gradually transferred from his body to the wood of the coffin and the adjacent soil.”—Chemiker Zeitung, No. 7, February 13th, 1879.
[139] See also a case in the Gaz. Médicale, 1850.
[140] When we bear in mind how small a space even 200 grains of arsenic would occupy—not more than that of an ordinary seidlitz powder—the suggestion of L’Angelier carrying this means of suicide about him, when keeping the supposed appointment on the Sunday night, is by no means improbable. And when his evident tendency to attempt self-destruction, when irritated or depresssed, is remembered, it is within the range of probability, that, if either the meeting took place and ended with a quarrel, or he failed to obtain a meeting, in the excited state of mind which either circumstance would have created, he in desperation swallowed the drug very shortly before he returned to his lodgings, only to die. This is a far more probable suggestion than that set up by the defence, that he had been dosing himself with arsenic on the road from Stirling to Glasgow. The difficulty is that purchases of arsenic by L’Angelier could not be proved. But, looking to the careless way in which it was exposed in the shops of some of the firms with which he had relations (evidence of Fleming and Townsend), he might have got it from thence, without its being known, or he might have purchased it in Edinburgh on his visit there, where he could not be easily recognised. He certainly had an unwholesome hankering after this drug.—G. L. B.
[141] To the medical profession, for whose use, as well as for that of their legal brethren, this volume is intended, any but a detailed report of the medical evidence in this disputed case would be useless.
[142] For the report of this trial I have relied on that published in Edinburgh by William Kay, 1865.