The pike, eels, and carp eat greedily always, as everybody knows--well, they feast on the vulture. Well, suppose the next day, one of these eels, or pike, or carp is served at your table, poisoned, as they are to the third generation. Well, then, your guest will be poisoned in the fifth generation, and die at the end of eight or ten days, of pains in the intestines, sickness, or abscess of the pylorus. The doctors open the body, and say, with an air of profound learning, 'The subject has died of a tumour on the liver, or typhoid fever.'" After attempting to kill half the household with brucine, Madame de Villefort changes her particular poison for a simple narcotic, recognized by Monte Christo (who in this instance frustrates the murderer) as being dissolved in alcohol. The name of the latter poison is not told us by the novelist, but on the doctor's examination of the suspected liquid we read, "He took from its silver case a small bottle of nitric acid, dropped a little of it into the liquor, which immediately changed to a blood-red colour." Perhaps the most curious method of poisoning ever used in fiction is that introduced by the late Mr. James Payn in his novel, "Halves." The poisoner uses finely chopped horse-hair as a medium for getting rid of her niece. In this way she brings on a disease which puzzles the doctor, until one day he comes across the would-be murderess pulling the horse-hair out of the drawing-room sofa, which causes him to suspect her at once. This ingenious lady introduced the chopped horse-hair into the pepper-pot used by her victim. The inimitable Count Fosco, whom Wilkie Collins introduces into "The Woman in White," was supposed to possess a remarkable knowledge of chemistry, although he says, "Only twice did I call science to my aid," in working out his plot to abduct Lady Glyde. His media were simple: "A medicated glass of water and a medicated bottle of smelling-salts relieved her of all further embarrassment and alarm." This genial villain waxes eloquent on the science of chemistry in his confession. "Chemistry!" he exclaims, "has always had irresistible attractions for me from the enormous, the illimitable power which the knowledge of it confers. Chemists--I assert it emphatically--might sway, if they pleased, the destinies of humanity. Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the mind? The body (follow me closely here) lies at the mercy of the most omnipotent of all potentates--the chemist. Give me--Fosco--chemistry; and when Shakespeare has conceived Hamlet, and sits down to execute the conception--with a few grains of powder dropped into his daily food, I will reduce his mind, by the action of his body, till his pen pours out the most abject drivel that has ever degraded paper. Under similar circumstances revive me the illustrious Newton. I guarantee that when he sees the apple fall he shall _eat it_, instead of discovering the principle of gravitation. Nero's dinner shall transform