1888.] on Poisons and Poisoning. 229 



profession we find closely associated, not only with the profession of 

 medicine (the art of healing), but with witchcraft, incantation, and 

 charms. The threefold arts of poisoning, witchcraft, and medicine, 

 moreover, became so closely allied to religion, as to claim, each and 

 all, the shield of a sacred sanction and the protection of a Divine 

 voice. Even that very word <^ap/xaKi9, the Greek for ' a dispenser of 

 medicines,' is the same word used to imply ' a witch ' and ' a poisoner* 

 The modern scientist has once and for ever shattered the bond that 

 united science with superstition. It was a special ministry of science 

 to teach men that in the preparation of medicines the pharmacist 

 required no stuffed crocodile to preside over the mysteries of his 

 laboratory, nor incantation to give virtue to his drugs ! 



And this secondly : The villanies of the early poisoners can 

 never again be practised in the light of the science of the nineteenth 

 century. Science can and has done what legislation could never 

 do. The Hebrew Scriptures speak of a time when " the sucking 

 child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall 

 put his hands on the basilisk's den " (Is. xi. 8, Eev. Ver.). Is not 

 science working out some such consummation as this ? I claim 

 that a science which, like a blood-hound, can track with cunning 

 scent the minutest atom of a poison in the body, is helj)ing forward 

 the day when poison shall cease to be the instrument of a secret 

 treachery, because there are eyes it cannot hope to evade, and a 

 science whose investigations it will not dare to defy. 



[C. M. T.] 



