LITMIR.BIZ

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test which I tried," he continued, "but which I can not take time to duplicate to-night. It was testified at the trial that conine, the active principle of hemlock, is intensely poisonous. No chemical antidote is known. A fifth of a grain has serious results; a drop is fatal. An injection of a most minute quantity of real conine will kill a mouse, for instance, almost instantly. But the conine which I have isolated in the body is inert!"

      It came like a bombshell to the prosecution, so bewildering was the discovery.

      "Inert?" cried Kilgore and Hollins almost together. "It can't be. You are making sport of the best chemical experts that money could obtain. Inert? Read the evidence—read the books."

      "On the contrary," resumed Craig, ignoring the interruption, "all the reactions obtained by the experts have been duplicated by me. But, in addition, I tried this one test which they did not try. I repeat: the conine isolated in the body is inert."

      We were too perplexed to question him.

      "Alkaloids," he continued quietly, "as you know, have names that end in 'in' or 'ine'—morphine, strychnine, and so on. Now there are two kinds of alkaloids which are sometimes called vegetable and animal. Moreover, there is a large class of which we are learning much which are called the ptomaines—from ptoma, a corpse. Ptomaine poisoning, as every one knows, results when we eat food that has begun to decay.

      "Ptomaines are chemical compounds of an alkaloidal nature formed in protein substances during putrefaction. They are purely chemical bodies and differ from the toxins. There are also what are called leucomaines, formed in living tissues, and when not given off by the body they produce auto-intoxication.

      "There are more than three score ptomaines, and half of them are poisonous. In fact, illness due to eating infected foods is much more common than is generally supposed. Often there is only one case in a number of those eating the food, due merely to that person's inability to throw off the poison. Such cases are difficult to distinguish. They are usually supposed to be gastro-enteritis. Ptomaines, as their name shows, are found in dead bodies. They are found in all dead matter after a time, whether it is decayed food or a decaying corpse.

      "No general reaction is known by which the ptomaines can be distinguished from the vegetable alkaloids. But we know that animal alkaloids always develop either as a result of decay of food or of the decay of the body itself."

      At one stroke Kennedy had reopened the closed case and had placed the experts at sea.

      "I find that there is an animal conine as well as the true conine," he hammered out. "The truth of this matter is that the experts have confounded vegetable conine with cadaveric conine. That raises an interesting question. Assuming the presence of conine, where did it come from?"

      He paused and began a new line of attack. "As the use of canned goods becomes more and more extensive, ptomaine poisoning is more frequent. In canning, the cans are heated. They are composed of thin sheets of iron coated with tin, the seams pressed and soldered with a thin line of solder. They are filled with cooked food, sterilised, and closed. The bacteria are usually all killed, but now and then, the apparatus does not work, and they develop in the can. That results in a 'blown can'—the ends bulge a little bit. On opening, a gas escapes, the food has a bad odour and a bad taste. Sometimes people say that the tin and lead poison them; in practically all cases the poisoning is of bacterial, not metallic, origin. Mr. Godwin may have died of poisoning, probably did. But it was ptomaine poisoning. The blown cans which I have discovered would indicate that."

      I was following him closely, yet though this seemed to explain a part of the case, it was far from explaining all.

      "Then followed," he hurried on, "the development of the usual ptomaines in the body itself. These, I may say, had no relation to the cause of death itself. The putrefactive germs began their attack. Whatever there may have been in the body before, certainly they produced a cadaveric ptomaine conine. For many animal tissues and fluids, especially if somewhat decomposed, yield not infrequently compounds of an oily nature with a mousey odour, fuming with hydrochloric acid and in short, acting just like conine. There is ample evidence, I have found, that conine or a substance possessing most, if not all, of its properties is at times actually produced in animal tissues by decomposition. And the fact is, I believe, that a number of cases have arisen, in which, the poisonous alkaloid was at first supposed to have been discovered which were really mistakes."

      The idea was startling in the extreme. Here was Kennedy, as it were, overturning what had been considered the last word in science as it had been laid down by the experts for the prosecution, opinions so impregnable that courts and juries had not hesitated to condemn a man to death.

      "There have been cases," Craig went on solemnly, "and I believe this to be one, where death has been pronounced to have been caused by wilful administration of a vegetable alkaloid, which toxicologists would now put down as ptomaine-poisoning cases. Innocent people have possibly already suffered and may in the future. But medical experts—" he laid especial stress on the word—"are much more alive to the danger of mistake than formerly. This was a case where the danger was not considered, either through carelessness, ignorance, or prejudice.

      "Indeed, ptomaines are present probably to a greater or less extent in every organ which is submitted to the toxicologist for examination. If he is ignorant of the nature of these substances, he may easily mistake them for vegetable alkaloids. He may report a given poison present when it is not present. It is even yet a new line of inquiry which has only recently been followed, and the information is still comparatively small and inadequate.

      "It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, for the chemist to state absolutely that he has detected true conine. Before he can do it, the symptoms and the post-mortem appearance must agree; analysis must be made before, not after, decomposition sets in, and the amount of the poison found must be sufficient to experiment with, not merely to react to a few usual tests.

      "What the experts asserted so positively, I would not dare to assert. Was he killed by ordinary ptomaine poisoning, and had conine, or rather its double, developed first in his food along with other ptomaines that were not inert? Or did the cadaveric conine develop only in the body after death? Chemistry alone can not decide the question so glibly as the experts did. Further proof must be sought. Other sciences must come to our aid."

      I was sitting next to Mrs. Godwin. As Kennedy's words rang out, her hand, trembling with emotion, pressed my arm. I turned quickly to see if she needed assistance. Her face was radiant. All the fees for big cases in the world could never have compensated Kennedy for the mute, unrestrained gratitude which the little woman shot at him.

      Kennedy saw it, and in the quick shifting of his eyes to my face, I read that he relied on me to take care of Mrs. Godwin while he plunged again into the clearing up of the mystery.

      "I have here the will—the second one," he snapped out, turning and facing the others in the room.

      Craig turned a switch in an apparatus which his students had brought from New York. From a tube on the table came a peculiar bluish light.

      "This," he explained, "is a source of ultraviolet rays. They are not the bluish light which you see, but rays contained in it which you can not see.

      "Ultraviolet rays have recently been found very valuable in the examination of questioned documents. By the use of a lens made of quartz covered with a thin film of metallic silver, there has been developed a practical means of making photographs by the invisible rays of light above the spectrum—these ultraviolet rays. The quartz lens is necessary, because these rays will not pass through ordinary glass, while the silver film acts as a screen to cut off the ordinary light rays and those below the spectrum. By this means, most white objects are photographed black and even transparent objects like glass are black.

      "I obtained the copy of this will, but under the condition from the surrogate that absolutely nothing must be done to it to change a fibre of the paper or a line of a letter. It was a difficult condition. While there are chemicals which are frequently resorted to for testing the authenticity of disputed decuments such as wills and deeds, their use frequently injures or destroys the paper under test. So far as I could determine, the document also defied the microscope.

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