divers colours and hues--white, red, blue, purple, and the like, which, being dry, will then stand stiff and inflexible about their necks.' Mrs Turner, at her execution, was arrayed in a ruff stiffened with the material for the invention of which she was so famous. She had for her scientific adviser a certain Dr Forman--a man who was believed to be deep in all kinds of dangerous chemical lore, and at the same time to possess a connection with the Evil One, which gave him powers greater than those capable of being obtained through mere scientific agency. Had he been alive, he would have undoubtedly been tried with the other poisoners. His widow gave some account of his habits, and of his wonderful apparatus, such as 'a ring which would open like a watch;' but the glimpse obtained of him is brief and mysteriously tantalising. We remember that, about twenty-five years ago, this man was made the hero of a novel called _Forman_, which contains much effective writing, but did not somehow fit the popular taste. Notwithstanding the scientific ingenuity both of the males and females concerned in this affair, the poisoning seems to have been conducted in a very bungling manner when compared with the slow and secret poisonings of the French and Italians. It is believed that a female of Naples, called Tophana, who used a tasteless liquid, named after her _Aqua Tophana_, killed with it 600 people before she was discovered to be a murderess. The complete secrecy in which these foreigners shrouded their operations--people seeming to drop off around them as if by the silent operation of natural causes--was what made their machinations so frightful. Poisoning, however, is a cowardly as well as a cruel crime, which has never taken strong root in English habits; and, as we have observed, the poisoners on this occasion, notwithstanding the skill and knowledge enlisted by them in the service, were arrant bunglers. Thus, the confession of James Franklin, an accomplice, would seem to shew that Sir Thomas Overbury was subjected to poisons enough to have deprived three cats of their twenty-seven lives.