---- They made different to any thing which I had ever made before.
---- Explain that difference?
---- They broke and crumbled all into little bits. I had to knock them in a stant like when we make butter. They would not hold together.
---- Had you more or less difficulty than usual?
---- More trouble than I ever had before.”
Extract from the trial.
[282]. We have been informed that, by this simple and beautiful test, Mr. Archdeacon Wollaston identified the presence of corrosive sublimate in the dumplings by which Michael Whiting attempted to poison his brothers-in-law, at Ely, as stated in the preceding page, as well as at [197]. Although in the report of the trial in our possession, the professor does not appear to have furnished the court with any account of the process by which he discovered the poison.
[283]. Trial of Mary Bateman for the wilful murder of Rebecca Perigo, at the York Assizes, 1809. As we have on several occasions alluded to this trial, it may perhaps be satisfactory to give a short sketch of the case in this place.
This diabolical woman, under the pretext of possessing the art of witchcraft, committed numerous frauds, and worked with so much success upon the credulity of her victims, as to obtain considerable sums of money, and reduce them to the extremes of poverty; while, in order to conceal the frauds, she consigned whole families to the grave by her poisons. Her detection was brought about by the robbery of a family of the name of Perigo, from whom she obtained the sum of seventy pounds, besides cloathes and furniture, under the pretence of engaging a Miss Blythe to relieve Perigo’s wife from the effects of an “evil wish,” under which she was supposed to labour; when the appointed time arrived for the restoration of the property, and the promised cure of the wife, Mary Bateman sent a powder (Arsenic) which she directed them to add to their pudding, and advised them, should they be ill after eating it, to take a spoonful of prepared honey with which she supplied them. The wife ate the pudding, and soon afterwards died; the husband, however, very narrowly escaped: for this murder she was tried and convicted; and thus was a system of robbery and murder, scarcely equalled in the annals of crime, happily exposed and ended.
[284]. In the Philosophical Magazine for December, 1821, a communication is to be found from a Mr. Murray, which would have been too ridiculous to require notice, had it not involved a question connected with the habitudes of corrosive sublimate and iron, which might possibly occasion error. After stating that certain metallic solutions may be decomposed through the agency of magnetism, he says, a solution of corrosive sublimate may be thus made to yield metallic mercury, by introducing into it a bar of magnetised iron! He had not the wit to inquire whether unmagnetised iron might not prove equally powerful as a decomposing agent.