Nay, a further proposition is also clear. If it is necessary that it should be first passed by means of the circulation into the solid tissues of the body, before it acts upon the nervous system, it will cease to be found in the blood. Again, a portion of it, if in excess, will be eliminated in the kidneys, and pass off in watery excretion. You do not know, therefore, in what part of the human body to put your hand upon it. But this is undoubtedly the fact, if there has been an excess over the quantity necessary to destroy the life of a particular individual, then, as soon as the absorbents have taken up the necessary quantity, the nervous system will at once be affected and life destroyed; you will find the excess in the stomach, if you adopt the proper means of seeking for it. Now, what did these gentlemen do? They gave never less than a grain--often as much as two grains; and yet we now know that a quarter of a grain is enough to destroy a small animal like a rabbit, and that no man could venture to hope for life who took half a grain or three-quarters of a grain of it. Therefore in the cases of their experiments, and experiments made, allow me to say, for the purpose of this case, after those parties had been retained--I use the word “retained,” for it is the appropriate word; no parties can be more thoroughgoing partisans than scientific men who have once taken up a case--after they have been retained for this case, and desire that their experiments should have a certain result, they take good care to have doses large enough to leave a small portion in the stomach. But be this as it may, I have only now to deal with the experiments of Professor Taylor and Dr. Rees; they may, for aught I know, be a pair of bunglers; it is no part of my business to uphold them if their professional reputation will not do it; but they tell us that they tried its effects upon four animals of the same species with fully adequate doses. Where they administered two grains they reproduced the poison in abundance; where they administered one grain they found a small indication of it; and when they administered half a grain to two rabbits they found no traces of the poison at all. It may well be that that may result, as Mr. Herapath says, from Professor Taylor not knowing the right way of going about it. It may be, if Mr. Herapath had had the stomach under his more scientific manipulation, he would have produced the strychnia. It is enough for my purpose when, as I show, the man who did in this case experiment upon the stomach of Mr. Cook, in two cases out of four when he had given a smaller dose to rabbits failed to reproduce the poison. What is the conclusion I draw from it? Why, that although I cannot have the advantage here which the positive detection of the strychnia would have afforded if it had been found, there is no room for the opposite conclusion--the converse of the proposition for which my learned friend and his witnesses contend--that the fact of the