causes, so will be the appearance of the heart, the brain, and the body after death. There is nothing, I say, in this for a single moment to negative the conclusion which you would otherwise arrive at from the symptoms which appeared in this man’s body at the time of his death and immediately afterwards--that those are the symptoms of tetanus of the strongest and most aggravated kind; that is a proposition about which, I think, you can entertain no doubt. If so, are they referable to tetanus of any other description? Certainly not; because, as Sir Benjamin Brodie told you, the course of the symptoms is marked by characteristics of unquestionable difference. [Sidenote: Attorney-General] Is it not then preposterous to contend that this was not a case of tetanus? And if every one of the distinctions they have attempted to set up I show you to have really nothing to do with the case (because I produce you at once an undoubted case in which the administration of strychnia is beyond the reach of question, in which those particular symptoms and appearances were manifested and observed) I get rid at once of all those vain, futile attempts to distinguish this case, either in its premonitory symptoms or in the appearances either before or upon post-mortem examination. I get rid of all those difficulties, and I come back to the symptoms which attended this unhappy man’s demise. I ask whether you can doubt that, when I have excluded all those cases of tetanic convulsions, epilepsy, and arachnitis, or angina pectoris, which occurred, you recollect, in a young girl after an attack of scarlet fever--in all human probability the scarlet fever had been thrown back upon the system, and had produced all those consequences--when I exclude all those cases, and then, lastly, exclude traumatic or idiopathic tetanus, what remains? The tetanus of strychnia, and the tetanus of strychnia only. I pray your attention to the cases of which evidence has been given, in which there was no question as to strychnia having been administered, there not being the shadow of a doubt about it, and in which the circumstances were so similar, and the symptoms so analogous, that I think you cannot hesitate to come to the conclusion that this was death by strychnia. Medical witnesses of the highest authority, both on the part of the Crown and on the part of the defence, agree that in the whole range of their experience and knowledge they know of no natural disease to which these remarkable symptoms can be referred. If that be so, and there is a known poison that will produce them, how strong, how cogent, how irresistible becomes the inference that to that poison, and to that poison alone, are those symptoms and this death to be ascribed! [Sidenote: Attorney-General]