offenders; which continued for some time to exert its jurisdiction under the title of CHAMBRE DE POISON, or CHAMBRE ARDENTE. With respect to the secret modes in which poisons have been supposed capable of acting, mankind have ever betrayed the most extravagant credulity, of which the numerous tales upon record afford ample proof; such as that reported of _Parasapis_ by _Plutarch_, from _Ctesias_, in his life of _Artaxerxes_, who, it is said, by anointing a knife on one side by poison, and therewith dividing a bird, poisoned _Statira_ with one half, and with the other regaled herself in perfect security. We are also told of _Livia_ who poisoned the figs on a tree which her husband was in the habit of gathering with his own hands. _Tissot_ informs us that _John_, king of Castille, was poisoned by a pair of boots prepared by a Turk; _Henry_ VI, by gloves[119]; Pope _Clement_ VII, by the fumes of a taper[120]; 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[121], 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 Overbury_, 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 preservatives, that the force of poisons was blunted upon him;” _Weston_ confessing, when he was reproached for not despatching him, that he had given enough to poison twenty men.[122] 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 possible 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 direction 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?_”