for eighteen years to the City of Dublin Hospital, who will tell you that he also entirely rejects that theory, and believes that it has no foundation in experiment or authority. I will call before you Dr. Letheby, one of the ablest and most distinguished among the men of science in this great city, Professor of Chemistry and Toxicology in the Medical College of the London Hospital, and medical officer of health of the city of London, who also rejects that theory as a heresy unworthy of the belief of scientific men. I will call before you Dr. Nicholas Parker, of the College of Physicians, a physician of the London Hospital and Professor of Medicine to that institution, who concurs with Dr. Letheby in his opinion; Dr. Robinson, also of the Royal College of Physicians; Mr. Rogers, Professor of Chemistry to St. George’s School; and lastly, I will call before you probably the most eminent chemical analyst in this country, Mr. William Herapath, of Bristol, who totally rejects the theory as utterly unworthy of credence--all of these gentlemen contending, and ready to depose to it on their oaths, that not only if half a grain, or the fiftieth part of a grain, but I believe they will go on to say that if five, or ten, or twenty times less than that quantity had entered into the human frame at all, it could be and must be detected by tests which are unerring. They will tell you this, not as the result of a day’s cruelty for ever regretted on five rabbits, but upon a large and tried experience upon the inferior animals, made and created, as you know they were, for the benefit of mankind; upon a very extensive experience in many cases, as to many of them, of the effects of strychnia on the human system. And not to detain you on this part of the case, to which I only now advert, not intending to press it on you later at any length, that you may see what the nature of the defence in point of medical testimony will be, I will satisfy you by evidence which I think must control your judgment, that the only safe conclusion at which you can arrive is that strychnia not having been found in Cook’s body, under the circumstances of this case never could have been there. You will find that they all agree in this opinion, that no degree of putrefaction or fermentation in the human system could in their judgment so decompose the poison of strychnia as that it should no longer possess those qualities which in its undecomposed state cause it to respond to the tests which are used for its detection. [Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]