24 ESSAY ON THE RATIONALE OF 



with the bottles ; on which he said he did it to taste it, though he 

 had not tasted the first bottle. The prisoner ordered a servant to 

 take away the basin, the dirty things, and the bottles, and put the 

 hottles into her hands for that purpose, who put them down again 

 on being directed by Lady Boughton to do so. The body was ex- 

 amined ten days after death, but putrefaction was far advanced, and 

 the head was not opened, nor were the bowels examined, and in 

 other respects the examination was incomplete and unskilfully per- 

 formed ; " so that very little reliance," says Dr. Christison, " can 

 be placed on the evidence from the inspection of the body."* Cap- 

 tain Donellan had a still in his own room, and had used it for dis- 

 tilling roses ; and a few days after Sir Theodosius's death he 

 brought it, full of wet lime, to one of the servants, to be cleaned. 

 It also appeared that Sir Theodosius, shortly before his death, had 

 bought arsenic to poison fish, and some of it was afterwards found 

 locked up in his closet. Captain Donellan appears to haA'e resorted 

 to several disingenuous devices to prevent the post-mortem exami- 

 nation of the body, and to induce Sir William Wheeler, the young 

 man's guardian, to believe that an examination had taken place, 

 when the professional men, having been led bj'^ the prisoner to sup- 

 pose it a case of ordinary sudden death, had declined the examina- 

 tion, on account of the advanced state of putrefaction in which they 

 found it ; there were several other circumstances of suspicion in the 

 prisoner's conduct. Four medical men, three of whom were physi- 

 cians, were examined on tbe part of the prosecution, and expressed a 

 very decided opinion — mainly grounded upon the symptoms, the 

 smell of the draught, as observed by Lady Boughton, and the simi- 

 lar effects produced by experiments on animals with laurel-water to 

 the symptoms in the case of Sir Theodosius — that the deceased died 

 of poison, and that the particular poison was laurel-water. The 

 weight of Dr. Rattray's opinion was greatly diminished by the fact 

 that, after he had known all the symptoms, and seen the body 

 opened, he had been as positive that Sir Theodosius died from arsenic 

 as he was at the time of the trial that he had died from laurel-water. 

 When asked " Why may you not be mistaken now ?'' he answered, 

 " I cannot conceive that, in these circumstances, any one can be 

 mistaken as to the medicine ; from the sensible qualities described 

 by Lady Boughton I believe it to be of that nature" — the sensible 

 qualities referred to being the resemblance of the smell to that of 

 bitter almonds. IMr. John Hunter was examined on the part of the 



" Christison, On Poisons, p. 725. 



