the May following, the glorious jubilee was
celebrated with great éclat, and with little sympathy
for them; but on the ninth of March, exactly
three years afterwards, a royal decree acquitted
them, and also acquitted the victim's memory,
and in the month Brumaire, Year II., the
Convention rehabilitated all the Calases. David de
Beaudrique, in fits of madness, twice threw
himself out of a window. The second fall proved
fatal; he died muttering the name of Calas.

Europe will do well to be curious to know
how the seventeenth of May, one thousand
eight hundred and sixty–two, is spent at Toulouse.
It will be the three hundredth anniversary of
the bloody triumph of Romanism in the old
head–quarters of Heresy. If the descendants
of the persecutors have acquired the feelings of
men, and the charity of Christians, it will be
spent as a day of humiliation; the feast will
become a fast; and the rich brocade and the
cloth of gold, will be exchanged for penitential
sackcloth and ashes.

POISON-PROOF

EVERY day we find reason to shrink from
saying of most things, "This is so," a sweeping
assertion being disproved now-a-days by
somebody or other almost as soon as it is out of our
mouths. A powerful instance of this in
connexion with one of our medical impressions has
lately appeared, and is too curious to be passed
over without notice. We have most of us
hitherto been in the habit of looking upon
strychnine as a deadly poison. We shudder at
the mere mention of the word. We remember
the Rugely tragedy, and see before us Palmer's
wretched victim distorted in the agonies of
tetanus. What does the reader say to a discovery
recorded in the pages of the Pharmaceutical
Journal, that there is a class of living creatures
actually in existence who not only partake of this
terrific poison habitually, without injury, but who
live upon it as their usual food, and thrive upon
the diet?

The living creatures who are given up to this
abnormal pastime of devouring strychnine, and
who may be regarded as the opium-eaters of the
animal creation, are minute beings resembling
those which will sometimes become developed by
a mouldy Stilton. They are called by the vulgar
"mites," and by the learned acari. They are,
however, not common cheese-mites, but so
different from them that, when an attempt was made
(to be presently alluded to) to induce some of the
respectable cheese amateurs to change their diet
for a course of strychnine, the poor things died
incontinently, as well-regulated mites might be
expected to do.

The unnatural mites, then, concerning whose
habits we have these few words to say, were
discovered by a gentleman of considerable chemical
attainments, while engaged in a microscopical
examination of certain efflorescences which
appear on the surface of medicinal extracts, "juices
of plants concentrated to a semi-solid condition."
Now, the most remarkable thing about this was
that the preparations themselves were of a nature
which might reasonably have been expected to
produce very injurious effects upon animal life,
while upon these mites they appeared to exercise
no evil influence whatever. Here were mites
living upon extract of colocynth, which it must
be admitted seems a rather choleraic diet, others
upon taraxacum, and others yet upon strychnine,
the extract of nux vomica.

The specially terrible effects of this horrible
poison on the muscular and nervous system
make this very wonderful, and the more so when
it is quite certain that it is not upon any fibrous
part of the plant in which the poisonous
principle was not that these animals thrived, but
upon the very poison itself. It appears from
Mr. Attfield's very, interesting account of his
experiments that there are other mites which
have been found living upon irritating vegetable
substances, but in those cases the "starchy and
soft fibrous matter only has been eaten, the
active principle being rejected." Mr. Attfield's
account is given in so comprehensible a form,
and is so curious and interesting to the general
reader, that we will give it now in his own
words:

"Remembering that all extracts have once
been liquid, their perfect homogeneousness
precludes the idea that an animal could select any
particular constituent. On the contrary, the
conclusion is irresistible, that in taking a mouthful
it must be devouring a portion of every
constituent; and that in eating nux vomica, therefore,
an acarus must be eating strychnine. But,
as ingeniously suggested by a physiological
friend, though the poison be eaten it may not be
assimilated, but pass through the intestinal canal
unchanged. To decide this point I examined a
few hundreds of acarine excrement from nux
vomica; about as much as would lie on a three-
penny piece. The collection of this substance
was easy, for, like the cheese-mites, the nux
vomica acari have rapid digestive and excretive
faculties. Moreover, the extract is heavier than
the excrement, so that on placing a quantity of
the disintegrated material on water the former
sinks, while the latter floats and may be skimmed
off. Only a trace of strychnine, however, was
found in the excrement; a quantity that,
considering the facility with which this alkaloid can
be separated from other organic matter, was
exceedingly minute; a quantity that, doubtless,
was dissolved from the extract by the water in
the separating process, and remained adhering
to the floating excrement.

"But to incontestably prove that mites live and
thrive upon food that is to man a deadly poison,
I secured some lively growing specimens from
the nux vomica extract, and after searching them
with a high magnifying power, in order to be
certain that no extract was accidentally adhering
to their bodies, confined them singly in glass
microscope cells, giving to several pure strychnine.
In less than two days the foodless ones
were all dead, killed, doubtless, by starvation;
while those supplied with strychnine were as
lively as ever. Three weeks after mounting they