![]() ![]() ![]() At the last minute, Watson marshals his reason and tackles Holmes, pushing him out of the room, where the pair of them lie breathless on the grass outside as the fumes and the poison recede. The impact is immediate: Watson describes a “turmoil in his brains” and a mounting loss of control of both mind and body. Holmes then lights the lamp, burning the powder with the window and door ajar for ventilation. Soon after, he proposes that he and Watson undertake a medical experiment to determine the powder’s effects on the body. En route to the story’s solve, Holmes detects a strange brown powder on the smoke-guard of a lamp at the scene. ![]() The case involves the mysterious injuries sustained by four siblings (two are fatal). Its transport to England is the work of the story’s lion-hunting physician, Dr. In the story, the plant-devil’s foot root-is little-known even in West Africa, its point of origin. Conan Doyle’s short story, “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” was published in 1910, and pivots on this fictional poisonous plant. Curious readers will need to turn instead to fiction to find it, and to the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. ![]() Nineteenth- and twentieth-century botanical dictionaries lack any mention of radix pedis diaboli. Illustration by Gilbert Holiday from the 1910 publication of “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” in The Strand magazine. ![]()
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