The offence of the prisoner was that of the murder of his wife, a crime which he perpetrated on Hounslow Heath, in a gig, within view of the gibbets which formerly stood there, by strangling her with the thong of his whip. He was apprehended upon suspicion of the crime, and was found guilty, and sentenced to death, but before the law could be executed upon him he died in Newgate, of the jail fever, on the 22d October, 1738. The following account of this malignant fever, shows the peculiar circumstances under which it first exhibited itself. It appears that it was always attended with a degree of malignity, in proportion to the closeness and stench of the place. The assize held at Oxford in the year 1577, called the "Black Assize," was a dreadful instance of the deadly effects of the jail fever. The judges, jury, witnesses, and in fact nearly every person except the prisoners, women, and children, in court, were killed by a foul air, which at first was thought to have arisen out of the bowels of the earth; but that great philosopher, Lord Bacon, proved it to have come from the prisoners, taken out of a noisome jail, and brought into court to take their trials; and they alone, being subject to the inhaling foul air, were not injured by it. "Baker's Chronicle," a work of the highest authenticity, thus speaks of the Black Assize:--"The Court were surprised with a pestilent savour, whether arising from the noisome smell of the prisoners, or from the damp of the ground, is uncertain; but all that were present within forty hours died, except the prisoners, and the women and children; and the contagion went no farther. There died Robert Bell, Lord Chief Baron, Robert de Olie, Sir William Babington, the high sheriff of Oxfordshire, some of the most eminent lawyers, the jurors, and three hundred others, more or less." Some attributed the cause of the sudden mortality at Oxford to witchcraft, the people in those times being very superstitious. In "Webster's Display of Witchcraft," a work of some authenticity as to the relation of circumstances as they occurred, we find the following account of the Black Assize, which we insert as a matter of curiosity:--