Gentlemen, the case which the Crown undertakes to establish against the prisoner at the bar, and to support by entirely circumstantial evidence, is, or may be, shortly stated thus. They say that the prisoner having in the second week in November made up his mind that it was his interest to get rid of John Parsons Cook, deliberately prepared his body for deadly poison by the slower poison of antimony, and afterwards despatched him by the deadly poison of strychnia. No jury will convict a man of the crime thus imputed to the prisoner, unless in the first place it be made clear that he had some motive for its commission, some strong reason for desiring the death of Cook; unless, in the second place, the symptoms of the deceased before death, and the appearance presented by his body after death, were consistent with the theory of death by strychnia poison, and inconsistent with the theory of death from other and natural causes; unless, thirdly, the circumstantial evidence against him is such as to be inexplicable upon the supposition of his innocence. Now, it is under these three heads that I intend to discuss the evidence that you have heard; and it must be plain to you that if I adhere to that order and method of treating the vast amount of proof which has been laid before you, I must exhaust the whole argument, and leave myself no chance without immediate detection of evading any difficulty in the defence.