8. Picric acid gives a yellow crystalline precipitate of the picrate.
9. Ammonium or potassium sulphocyanate produces crystalline precipitates.
10. Ferri-cyanide of potassium produces a crystalline precipitate with solutions of salts of strychnine.
Strychnine may not be found in the body, even after death from poisoning by it, for the following reasons:
1. Smallness of the quantity taken.
2. The time which has elapsed after taking the strychnine until the symptoms commence.
3. If the careful preservation of the stomach and its contents has been overlooked.
4. The alkaloid may have been eliminated from the body before death.
Treatment.—Evacuation of the stomach by emetics and the stomach pump, under anæsthesia, and then the administration of animal charcoal, iodide of potash, tannic acid, and tea; bromide of potassium in large doses (half an ounce), and repeated in smaller doses. Chloral should be given in five-grain doses hypodermically every ten minutes, until the convulsions are subdued. Chloroform should be inhaled for some time. Urethane is said by Anrep to be more useful than chloral, and should be given in drachm doses.