the important fact--antimony is found in the tissues of that man’s body, and his blood shows the presence of it; the blood shows distinctly that it must have been taken recently, within the last eight-and-forty hours previous to his death. How came it there? The small quantity that is found does not form the slightest criterion of the quantity that had been administered to him. Part of it, you know, would be thrown up by the act of vomiting which it provokes; part of it would pass away in other forms, but none would be there unless he had taken some. When did he take it? If you find that he is suffering from vomiting for days before his death--that a person is constantly administering things to him, and after taking those things he vomits--when the prisoner sends him over a basin of broth he vomits, and when the servant takes a couple of spoonfuls she is reduced to the same condition--what other conclusion can you come to, knowing that antimony is an irritant that will produce vomiting and retching in the human system, than that the antimony must have been administered to him by some one? By whom? Who but the prisoner at the bar could have done it? My learned friend says Cook might have taken antimony at some former time--that he might have taken James’ powder for a cold. There is not the slightest trace of evidence from the beginning to the end of the case that he ever had a cold, or ever took James’ powder over the whole period we are now ranging. Moreover, as I have even now said, it was in his blood, it must have been administered eight-and-forty hours before death; who could have administered it but the prisoner at the bar? I ask you to form your own judgment upon that matter, but I cannot resist the conclusion, it is irresistible. If so, for what purpose was it administered; it is difficult to say with anything like precision; one can only speculate upon it. It may have been, however, to produce the appearance of natural disease, to account for the calling in of medical men, and to account for the catastrophe which was already in preparation; but it may also have had another and a different object, and it is this--if we are right as to the motives which impelled the prisoner at the bar to commit this great crime, it was, at all events in part, that he might possess himself of the money which Cook would have to realise upon the settling day at Tattersall’s on Monday. If Cook went there himself the scheme was frustrated; Mr. Cook intended to go there himself, and if he had done so the prisoner’s designs would have failed of accomplishment. To make him ill at Shrewsbury--to get him in consequence to go to Rugeley, instead of going to London or anywhere else--to make him ill again and keep him ill at Rugeley might be part of a cleverly contrived and organised scheme. It might have been with one or other of those motives, it might have been with both, that the antimony was administered, and so sickness produced,