POISONING FIENDS.

Inangahua Times, Volume VII, Issue 1092, 26 May 1882, Page 2

POISONING FIENDS.

♦ ■ The Lamson case recalls a hundred hideous occurrences — brings to our minds the names of a long string of male and female poisoners and their victim, from De Brinvilliers to Bravo. A dread of domestic poisoning once more reigns. There is arsenic in the teapot and prussic acid in the beerbarrel. Aconite lurks in our evening grog, and the sherry decanter that graces the mid-day board and gleams in the sunshine hides the deadly drug. One or two of the leading London doctors have electrified society by stating that they have each of them in their practice met with more than one deliberate attempt at murder by poisoning, and that they have no doubt their experience is snared by thousands of other practitioners. Judging from reports in the medical journals, the science of poisoning progresses much more rapidly than the means for detecting those who carry it into practice. It is well that most murders are clumsy. Lamson used aconite, enough of which to kill ten men was found in his poor victim's body. Considering the strides made in the department of crime too much control cannot be exercised by the State over the sale of poisons. Fashion leads people to queer extremes, and it may be be yet the custom for husbands and wives to resort to the poison-bottle in lieu of the divorce court — if fornoother reason than that toxicology is cheaper and far more certain than law. It has been facetiously suggested in England that as domestic poisoning is far more general than it is believed to be, every wife should adopt the Hindoo practice, and burn herself at the death of her husband

but the subject is hardly one to jest over. A mere mention of it brings to mind Charles Dickens's story of " Hunted Down," in which Thomas Griffiths Wainwright (otherwise ' Janus Weathercock,") the elegant literary friend of Charles Lamb and Hazlit, is introduced to an admiring public. This scoundrel did not adopt the colonial plan of assuring the lives of moribund.* ; he took out policies for women, and then slowly poisoned them. He even killed his beautiful niece. The prisoner is the most dangerous, because the most stealthy, deliberate, and remorseless of murderers. When Wainworth (who was transported) was in the gaol hospital at Hobart, he went to the bedside of a felllow-prisoner with whom he had quarrelled. ' You are dying !' he hissed, 'In six hours you will be a corpse, and (pointing to his elbow) * I shall be up to this, dissecting you!" With memories of such tilings as these and the case of Palmer, the Bugley murderer, there is little doubt that the law will exact fiom convicted poisoners a terrible retribution. — Sydney Bulletin.