ABSTRACT
Scientifically speaking, we left strychnine and brucine in the hands of Pelletier and Caventou back in the dawning years of the nineteenth century. Subsequently, the two alkaloids played an important part in the history of science, and now is the time to bring the story up to date. In terms of their chemistry, the two alkaloids remained intractable enigmas for well over a century. They were even given their own quasi-alchemical symbols,1 St+
and B+. It was, or should have been, a cause of constant uneasiness to the nineteenth-century chemists that the fate of a suspected murderer could depend on the correct interpretation of the results of colour tests on substances about which virtually nothing was truly known.
