1888.] on Poisons and Poisoning. 221 



" An open fight ! " Is the suggestion (think you) too wild, sup- 

 posing " war chemists " with their powders, their gun-cotton, and 

 their explosives never to have been invented, that nations would have 

 turned for their " instrumenta belli " to toxicologists and their poisons. 

 I claim, however (notwithstanding that in this we missed our chance), 

 no more for my subject than its due, if I attempt to localise the very 

 cradle-room of science as the laboratory of the toxicological worker. 



Besides snake-poison, the use of animal fluids, either alone or 

 mixed with snake-poison, with which to charge arrows, is pre-historic. 

 Thus in old Greek legend we read how Hercules dipped his arrows 

 in the gall of the Lernaean Hydra to render the wounds they inflicted 

 incurable and mortal, and how at last Hercules himself was poisoned 

 by his wife's present, the tunic of the Centaur Nessus stained with 

 his poisonous blood, which she vainly hoped might restore her 

 husband's affection, but which only procured for him the frightful 

 agonies and tortures of which he died. 



The use of putrid blood as a poisonous agent and the admixture 

 of the snake-poison with blood constitutes a curious history, when 

 regarded in connection with our present views on septicaemia. The 

 toxic activity of putrid animal fluids seems to have been recognised 

 in very early times. And I suppose these early observations on the 

 effects of putrid blood explain the view almost universally adopted, 

 that blood itself was a poison. Thus the deaths of Psammenitus, king 

 of Egypt (as recorded by Herodotus), and of Themistocles (as re- 

 corded by Plutarch), were said to have been effected by the adminis- 

 tration of bullock's blood. Even Blumenbach, so lately as the middle 

 of the last century, persuaded one of his class (by way of settling 

 the question) to drink seven ounces of warm bullock's blood. The 

 young man (good as were his intentions) did not die a martyr to 

 science. 



The history of poisons and poisoning, the contents of the first 

 chapter of which I have thus briefly indicated (viz. the toxicity of the 

 snake-poison and of blood), down to the final chapter, which com- 

 mences with the properties and reactions of arsenic, forms a tempting 

 subject for my lecture to-night. The histories of Circe and Medea — 

 of Livia Drusilla and Locusta — of Tiberius and Nero — of the Borgias 

 — of Hieronyma Spara, Tofana, Catherine de Medicis, St. Croix, and a 

 host of other worthies, have proved charming topics for the marvellous- 

 monger. And it would not have been an unworthy subject to bare 

 the truths underlying the stories of generations of story-tellers, 

 obscured as they have become by the demand of ignorant sensa- 

 tionalism and the terrors of a mean superstition. But this is not the 

 subject I have proposed to myself for the discourse to-night. 



"What is a Poison?" 



Two diflBculties present themselves in answering this question : 



1. The laio Ms not defined a poison, notwithstanding that the law 

 at times demands of science the definition of a poison. 



