, who was called next, and whose evidence excited the keenest
interest, identified the prisoner as the man whom he had caused to be
arrested in the office of Messrs. Martin and Wright, and whom he had
known as Cranley. His medical evidence was given at considerable length,
and need not be produced in full detail On examining the body of Richard
Johnson, his attention had naturally been directed chiefly to the
tattooings. He had for some years been deeply interested, as an
ethnologist, in the tattooed marks of various races. He had found many
curious examples on the body of the dead man. Most of the marks
were obviously old; but in a very unusual place, generally left
blank--namely, behind and under the right shoulder--he had discovered
certain markings of an irregular character, clearly produced by an
inexperienced hand, and perfectly fresh and recent. They had not healed,
and were slightly discolored. They could not, from their position,
possibly have been produced by the man himself. Microscopic examinations
of these marks, in which the coloring matter was brown, not red or blue,
as on the rest of the body, showed that this coloring matter was of
a character familiar to the witness as a physiologist and scientific
traveller. It was the _Woorali_, or arrow poison of the Macoushi Indians
of Guiana.

Asked to explain the nature of this poison to the Court, the witness
said that its "principle" (to use the term of the old medical writers)
had not yet been disengaged by Science, nor had it ever been compounded
by Europeans. He had seen it made by the Macoushi Indians, who combined
the juice of the Woorali vine with that of certain bulbous plants, with
certain insects, and with the poison-fangs of two serpents, boiling the
whole amidst magical ceremonies, and finally straining off a thick brown
paste, which, when perfectly dry, was used to venom the points of their
arrows. The poison might be swallowed by a healthy man without fatal
results. But if introduced into the system through a wound, the poison
would act almost instantaneously, and defy analysis. Its effect was to
sever, as it were, the connection between the nerves and the muscles,
and the muscles used in respiration being thus gradually paralyzed,
death followed within a brief time, proportionate to the size of the
victim, man or animal, and the strength of the dose.

Traces of this poison, then, the witness had found in the fresh tattoo
marks on Johnson's body.