The Webster case had its seeming prototype and parallel in one mentioned in the London “Medical journal,” volumes V., 411, and XV., 518, where a corpse was disinterred a Lyons, in France, seven years after the burial, and identi fied by the hair and teeth. In that case M. Orfila was asked if a body removed from the grave after such a lapse of time could possibly afford proofs of poison, and if so in what manner such an ex amination was to be conducted. To which ho replied that it was very pro bable the body was already reduced to ashes, but that nevertheless, if a sort of blackish cobm was found at the sides of the spinal column, chiefly in the lumbar and dorsal regions, that mass might be analyzed in the manner pointed out in his work on Toxicology. And again, in the trial of Cook, at Leicester, in 1834, a parallel is furnished. In that case, Cook, after burning the body of the victim, was convicted by means of a por tion of the flesh of the murdered man being found, sufficiently large to be identified a 3 belonging to the body of a male adult.”

But the very prototype and pattern of of the Webster case was the case of Theodore Gardello, tried for the murder of his mistress, at the Old Bailey, in 1761, which, as proving at least that there is nothing new under the sun, we will briefly recapitulate from the account given in the Newgate Calendar. Gar delle was a foreigner, a native of Geneva, who lodged at the house of a Mrs King, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This Mrs King subsequently became his mistress during his residence there. Gardelle one day, being something of an artist, painted her picture, and did not make it handsome enough to suit her. Upon this trivial pretext, at one time when they were

alone in the house, they quarreled, and the quarrel growing to blows, Gardelle finally stabbed the woman with a sharp ivory-pointed comb, in the throat, until she died. He then put the body into her own bed, and covered it with the bed clothes, after which, according to his own story, he fainted away at the thought of what he had done. 