436 History of Poisons. [June, 



by the fumes of a taper ;* and our king John in a wassail bowl, 

 contaminated by matter extracted from a living toad. To these 

 few instances of credulity may be added the offer of the priest 

 to destroy queen Elizabeth by poisoning her saddle,+ and the 

 Earl of Essex, by anointing his chair. 



Incredible and absurd as these opinions now appear, they 

 continued until a late period to alarm mankind, and to perplex 

 and baffle judicial investigations ; even Lord Bacon in his charge 

 against the Earl of Somerset for the murder of Sir Thomas Over- 

 bury, in the Tower, seemed to give credit to the story of Livia, 

 and he seriously stated, that " Weston chased the poor prisoner 

 with poison after poison ; poisoning salts, poisoning meats, 

 poisoning sweetmeats, poisoning medicines and vomits, until at 

 last his body was almost come, by the use of poisons, to the 

 state that Mithridates's body was by the use of treacle and pre- 

 servatives, that the force of poisons was blunted upon him ; " 

 Weston confessing, when he was reproached for not dispatching 

 him, that he had given enough to poison twenty men.j The 

 power of so graduating the force of a poison as to enable it to 

 operate at any given period seems to have been considered pos- 

 sible by the earlier members of the Royal Society ; for we learn 

 from Spratt's history of that learned body, that very shortly after 

 its institution, a series of questions were drawn up by the direc- 

 tion of the Fellows, for the purpose of being submitted to the 

 Chinese and Indians, viz. " Whether the Indians can so prepare 

 that stupifying herb, Datura, that they make it lie several days, 

 months, years, according as they will have it, in a man's body, 

 without doing him any hurt, and at the end kill him without 

 missing half an hour's time ? " 



That mankind were, in a very early stage of their existence, 

 not only acquainted with the deadly effects of certain natural 

 substances when applied in minute quantities, but that they 

 availed themselves of such knowledge for the accomplishment 

 of the worst purposes, is very satisfactorily shown by the records 

 of sacred as well as profane authors. But such is the ambiguity 

 of ancient writers upon this subject, and so intimately blended 

 are all their receipts with the practices of superstition, that' every 

 research, however learned, into the exact nature of the poisons 

 which they employed, is necessarily vague and unsatisfactory. 

 Of this one fact, however, we may be perfectly satisfied, that they 

 were solely derived from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, 

 for the discovery of mineral poisons was an event of later date ; 

 owing however to the defect of botanical nomenclature, it is even 

 doubtful whether the plants which are designated by the terms 

 cicuta, aconitum, Sec. in ancient authors, were identical with 

 those we designate by the same names. (See Pharmacologia, 

 fifth edit. vol. i. p. 66.) With respect to the poisons of Locusta, 



• Quast. Med. Leg. 



+ Sir Edward Coke in the trial of Sir John Hollis. 



£ Bacon's Works, vol. ii. p. 614, 



