A curious investigation was held on Wednesday on the alleged
poisoning of a girl at West Mailing, in Kent, by oil of bitter almonds. Mr. Timins, the incumbent of the parish, who studied medicine at St. Thomas's Hospital in his youth and has been accustomed to use his knowledge for the benefit of his parishioners, who has been the incumbent for forty years, and who is sixty-nine years of age, admitted that he had himself given the girl a teaspoonful of oil of almonds,—he believed it to be the innocent oil, not the one containing prussic acid,—and had, on her crying out, taken a teaspoonful of it himself, to show its harmlessness. He had remained with the girl for three-quarters of an hour after giving her the dose, and except at the moment of taking it, she had seemed perfectly easy. He himself had found it very difficult to swallow, but he had suffered no subsequent inconvenience from his dose. The girl, how- ever, it is stated, after his departure became sick, and according to the testimony of the chemist who analysed what came from her stomach, prussic acid was found in it, and was the cause of death. The case is a very curious one,—the girl's mother admitting that she saw Mr. Timins take a tea- spoonful after her daughter had cried out, and Mr. Timing asserting that the oil was certainly the innocent oil, and not the poisonous oil. On the other hand, he never produced the bottle from which the dose was taken, for analysis by the chemist,— as it is said, though it is denied positively by himself, that he had promised to do,—and the analyst declares that death proceeded from no natural disease, but from the poison of this dose. The inquiry stands adjourned.
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