Palmer speedily found imitators. Within a few weeks occurred the Leeds poisoning case, in which the murderer undoubtedly was inspired by the facts made public at Palmer's trial. Dove, a fiendish brute, found from the evidence in that case that he could kill his wife, whom he hated, with exquisite torture, and with a poison that would leave, as he thought, no trace. In the latter hope he was happily disappointed. But as this case is beyond my subject, I merely mention it as one of the group already referred to. Three years later came the case of Dr. Smethurst, presenting still greater features of resemblance with Palmer's, for both were medical men, and both raised difficult questions of medical jurisprudence. In both the jury had no doubt as to the guilt of the accused, only in Smethurst's case the then Home Secretary, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, could not divest his mind of serious doubt, and of which the murderer got the benefit. Smethurst's escape may have influenced the jury in the Poplar poisoning case, which followed close on its heels, although in that the verdict of "Not Guilty" was excusable, as the evidence was entirely circumstantial. There was no convincing proof that the accused had administered the poison, although beyond question that poison had occasioned the death. Dr. Smethurst was long an inmate of Newgate, and was tried at the Central Criminal Court. He had all the characteristics of the poisoner--the calm deliberation, the protracted dissimulation, as with unshrinking, relentless wickedness the deadly work is carried on to the end. Smethurst's victim was a Miss Bankes, with whom he had contracted a bigamous marriage. He had met her at a boarding-house, where he lived with his own wife, a person of "shady" antecedents, and whom he left without scruple to join Miss Bankes. The latter seems to have succumbed only too willingly to his fascinations, and to have as readily agreed to marry him, in spite of the existence of the other Mrs. Smethurst. Probably the doctor had told her the story he brought forward when tried for bigamy, namely, that Mrs. Smethurst had no right to the name, but had a husband of her own, one Johnson, alive--a story subsequently disproved. Miss Bankes seems to have counted upon some species of whitewashing, no less than the repudiation of the other marriage, and told her sister as much when they last met. For some months Smethurst and Miss Bankes lived together as man and wife, first in London, and then at Richmond. She had a little fortune of her own, some £1700 or £1800, and a life-interest in £5000, a fact on which Smethurst's counsel dwelt with much weight, as indicating a motive for keeping her alive rather than killing her. But probably the lump sum was the bait, or perhaps Smethurst wished to return to his temporarily deserted first wife. Whatever the exact cause which impelled him to crime, it seems certain that he began to give her some poison, either arsenic or