14 
ON MAGNESIUM. 
then secured it, and on the 25tli, when he saw Lait and his wife together, he 
felt it his duty to tell her, in the husband’s presence, that her illness was not 
from disease but from poison ; that if she remained there she would die, and he 
would not sign a certificate; but if she removed she might be cured. It sub¬ 
sequently appeared that on that day Lait called in Dr. Jeston, but on the 29th 
Lait called at Dr. Salter’s surgery and said the sickness was just as bad; he 
was given powders of oxalate of cerium; on the 7tli a message was left at Dr. 
Salter’s surgery to say that Mrs. Lait was dead. The two surgeons consulted 
together, and the result was that they both refused a certificate. An inquest 
was held, and a post mortem and analysis ordered. The matters were sent me 
by the Coroner, and on examination I found the stomach greatly inflamed, par¬ 
ticularly in the cardiac portion, the mucous surface raised by air blisters, the 
intestines were only moderately acted on. In the vomit secured by Dr. Salter, 
I found traces of sulphates of zinc and iron, so I did in the lower intestines, but 
in the food contained in the stomach and duodenum there was only sulphate of 
iron. The most suspicious part of this case lies in the fact that the woman was 
always sick after food or drink from her husband, and not otherwise, and she 
had always complained of a coppery taste in the mouth. The verdict returned 
by the jury was to the effect, but not in the exact words,—Died from taking 
sulphate of zinc, a deadly poison, but by whom given is to the jurors unknown. 
William Herapath, Sen., F.C.S., etc., 
Professor of Chemistry and Toxicology, British Medical School. 
ON MAGNESIUM. 
The existence of magnesium was revealed by Sir Humphry Davy. By means of 
large electric batteries at the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, London, he succeeded 
in decomposing sundry earths and alkalies, and demonstrated their metallic bases. 
Thereby he opened a new continent to scientific exploration—a continent as yet virgin 
in many regions, as America or Australia. 
Magnesium dates from Davy, in 1808, but for half a century it stood for little but a 
name in the catalogue of elements. In combination with oxygen, as the medicine mag¬ 
nesia, it was familiar to everybody, but as a metal it has been a very great rarity, pre¬ 
served in bottles and sold in grains at fancy prices, and even then but seldom pure. 
Indeed, in several manuals of chemistry it is so incorrectly described, that it is evident 
the authors have never seen the metal in simplicity. 
It would appear that Davy did little more than indicate the existence of magnesium. 
His discoveries were too numerous for him to track out each in detail, and twenty years 
elapsed ere any one was tempted to resume the study of magnesium from the point 
where he left it. In 1827, Wheeler having obtained aluminium by the decomposition 
of the chloride of aluminium by potassium, it occurred to Alexander Bussy, the Parisian 
chemist, that it would be possible to divorce magnesium from its combination with chlo¬ 
rine in the same way. He tried and succeeded. He fused some globules of potassium 
in a glass tube with anhydrous chloride of magnesium, and to his delight obtained glo¬ 
bules of the metal. In 1830 he made the process the subject of a memoir addressed to 
the Royal Academy of Sciences.* Bussy is sometimes credited with the discovery of 
magnesium, but though that honour is unquestionably Davy’s, he was certainly the first 
to exhibit it in anything beyond microscopic quantities and to describe its properties. 
With Bussy, progress ceased for another series of years. Becquerel, by electrolysis, 
from a solution of the chloride of magnesium procured the metal in minute octahedral 
crystals. Bunsen, likewise by electrolysis, obtained the met£il, and further modified 
Bussy’s process by adding chloride of sodium or of potassium to the anhydrous chloride of 
magnesium. Matthiessen, in turn, tried to improve upon Buns;en by adding chloride of 
‘Journal de Chimie Medicalc,’ March, 1830, and ‘Annales de: Chimic et dc Physique,’ 
vol.xlyi. page 434. ' J 1 
