by E. J. Wagner
It seems more likely that the ubiquity of the tales is due to a mixture of truly ancient folklore: that of the Nordic tradition, with its myth of the great wolf Fenris, who if freed from his chains will bring about the end of the world; and that of the occupying Romans, who brought with them traces of all the nations they had previously conquered and whose myths they had assimilated. These myths inevitably connected the Black Dog with death and its rites. Notable among these were the customs of the ancient Greeks, who told tales of the hell-hound Cerberus, who guarded the kingdom of the dead, and of the Egyptians, whose elaborate concern with the afterlife and the preservation of human remains rested heavily on the figure of the black dog–headed god Anubis. According to legend, it was Anubis who brought the art of embalming and mummification to the Egyptians.
According to Egyptian mythology, Osiris was the child of the sun god Ra and was both brother and husband to the goddess Isis. Osiris was much loved by the people but greatly resented and envied by his evil brother, Set. Set murdered Osiris by trickery, locking him into an ornately carved chest and throwing it into the Nile. When Isis succeeded in recovering her husband’s body, Set wrested it from her and hacked the corpse into fourteen pieces, scattering them throughout the land of Egypt. Isis persevered, gathering up all the bloody shreds of her husband except the phallus, which had been thrown into the Nile and devoured by the fish Oxyrhynchus, a species of long-nosed sturgeon.
Anubis, the god of embalming, always represented as having the head of a black dog or a doglike jackal, came to the aid of the goddess. He helped her to restore the corpse and guarded her as she fashioned an artificial penis for the body. Isis, who is usually represented with winged arms, fluttered them over Osiris, restoring his life force so that he might take his proper place as the god of the afterworld.
In this tale we find many seeds of ancient British folklore, including the ubiquitous Black Dog, its association with death, and the view of the dead body as somehow magical. “Mummy” was a common ingredient in potions and medicines in Britain, as well as on the continent, and a lucrative commerce existed from the Middle Ages on in the importation of the dried dead. (Much of the “mummy” was manufactured by clever entrepreneurs with an eye for both money and the macabre. It was possible to buy powdered mummy in a New York City pharmacy as recently as 1955 for twenty-five dollars an ounce.)
The common folk belief in Britain that animal “familiars”— usually black cats, dogs, or sometimes hares—were given to witches by the devil to carry out evil deeds shows traces of Egyptian-Roman lore. Animal body parts figured heavily in recipes for complex elixirs, as did human body fragments.
The notion that body parts of the dead had connections to witchcraft and black magic was firmly held well past the Victorian age. Rope that had hanged a man was prized for its supposed healing qualities, and the application of the hand of a hanged man to a wen, or skin blemish, was supposed to cure it. It was partly because of the connection with black magic that dissection of the human body was originally held in disrepute. The great fear was that the parts might be put to dangerous uses.
For many centuries it was a religious precept that the human body contained the “luz” bone—a particular bone from which the entire body of a dead individual would be resurrected at the Day of Judgment. There was no agreement as to where this part lay, although a sizable group of religious experts claimed that the coccyx—the bone at the base of the spine—was the appropriate spot.
This ingrained fear of the dead as dangerous, and the fact that animal predators such as dogs attracted by the scent could often be found near gallows or shallow graves, fed the Black Dog stories and provided them with lasting power. Arthur Conan Doyle made such striking use of the Black Dog tales in The Hound of the Baskervilles that in spite of Sherlock Holmes’s steely logic in confronting the beast, the fearsome image continues to haunt:
“[I]t was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hardheaded countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the district, and that it is a hardy man who will cross the moor at night.”
The mysterious qualities of dogs made for fascinating fiction, but in the real world of crime investigation their abilities took longer to find a purpose. Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes make use of them in several stories, such as “The Adventure of the Missing Three Quarter,” in which the hound Pompey has evidently been taught to track drags or lures scented with aniseed. (This was often done by sportsmen—either to train young dogs to follow a scent, or to have the excitement of the chase without the cruelty of the kill.) Holmes uses the scent to track the solution to the mystery.
In “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place,” the family spaniel’s ability to tell mistress from stranger provides Holmes with the vital clue, and he announces to Watson, “Dogs don’t make mistakes.” Maybe not, but their handlers often do, as was made very apparent during the search for the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper in 1888. Two highly touted English bloodhounds, Barnaby and Burgo, were brought to Regent’s Park, very near Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street address in London, to practice tracking before being placed on the killer’s trail. The first trial runs were successful, but disaster followed when they were allowed off their leads and seemed to disappear. There is some disagreement as to where the dogs went—whether they were lost or simply had been returned to their kennel without the authorities being told. What is certain is that the Times of London printed an item asking anyone with information about the dogs’ whereabouts to inform Scotland Yard at once.
When it became known that Burgo and Barnaby had been located, they and their handlers were the subject of many clever remarks. But the odd fact is that while the public believed them to be roaming free in London, there were no Ripper murders, and the crimes began again only after it was announced that the dogs were back and restrained in their kennels. Perhaps an atavistic belief in the mysterious powers of dogs stayed the Ripper’s hand for a bit. But that was all the help the dogs supplied, for Burgo and Barnaby, lacking the specialized training needed for police work, never found helpful evidence in the case of Jack the Ripper.
In “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” Sherlock Holmes announces, “I have serious thoughts of writing a small monograph upon the uses of dogs in the work of the detective.” If only he had, Scotland Yard might have made excellent use of it in the 1888 “autumn of terror.”
Dogs as well as assorted other animals were also the subjects of a number of other early criminal investigations. A great preoccupation during the Victorian age was the charge of bestiality, and the presence of animal hair was considered important evidence of this crime. The English pathologist Alfred Swaine Taylor wrote in the late 1800s, “Trials for sodomy and bestiality are very frequent, and conviction of men and boys have taken place for unnatural connection with cows, mares, and other female animals. It is punishable by penal servitude for life.” (As recently as 1950, the Scottish pathologist John Glaister included in his text the tale of a man “who was apprehended after having been seen to have unnatural intercourse with a duck,” leaving us to wonder precisely what natural intercourse with a duck would involve.)
An amazing amount of police laboratory time and money was spent collecting evidence in bestiality cases, which might have more appropriately fallen to the province of the ASPCA. But in the process some useful information about hair and fur comparisons was acquired. A primary issue was the difficulty in firmly establishing the difference between human and animal hair.
During the middle of the nineteenth century, some work had been done on differentiating between horsehair and human hair, and in 1869, a German researcher named Emile Pfaff was credited with a paper on a similar subject. It was noted that animal hair generally had cuticle cells that were larger and not as regular as those in humans.
Taylor made many references in his text to identifying animal hairs on weapons as well as on clothing.
“If a hair submitted for examination be not human, from what animal has it been derived?” asked pathologist Charles Meymott Tidy in his 1882 Legal Medicine. And to provide an answer to his own question, he wrote that he “found it convenient [just as Holmes might have done] to keep a series of hairs of different animals ready mounted, for purposes of comparison.”
As forensic techniques have improved, animals have provided important information about crime scenes. In 2003, Reuters reported that a white-crested cockatoo, found dead at the scene of his master’s murder, held vital evidence of the murderer. The bird’s beak was found to be wet with the blood of the assailant, whom the valiant bird had attacked (reminding us of Holmes’s remark in The Hound of the Baskervilles: “The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?”), and the DNA extracted from the bloody beak was sufficient to ensure a life sentence for the killer.
But no matter how strong the science, we still cannot forget the image of Old Shuck, the Gurt Dog, the Padfoot, Hooter, Barghest, Galleytrot, the Shug, Hairy Jack—the Great Black Dog, waiting at the crossroads in the fading light to meet an unfortunate traveler and guide him to a fatal appointment.
Whatever remains
• It was traditional in Egyptian mummification rites that the first embalmer to incise the corpse, known as the “cutter,” was ritually cursed and chased away from the embalming table by the other attendants. The remainder of the embalming process was carried out by the “salter,” who was depicted wearing the black dog–mask of Anubis. This ambivalence toward opening the human body foreshadowed the resistance to human dissection that limited anatomical exploration for centuries.
• To protect against witches, British villagers often buried “witch bottles” near their front door steps. The bottles contained urine, pins and needles, and other odds and ends, and were believed to keep witches at bay. The custom was imported to New England.
• In 1944, during the Second World War, Helen Duncan was tried at the Old Bailey (London’s historic criminal court) on charges of witchcraft, under a law that had not been applied for more than a century. Helen, who had been born in 1887, held regular séances, and a few of her predictions were so accurate that some in the War Office became seriously concerned that she would somehow discern and reveal the date of the forthcoming landing at Normandy. She was found guilty under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 and sentenced to nine months’ incarceration at Holloway Prison.
The Witchcraft Act was not repealed until 1951. CHAPTER 3
A Fly in the Ointment
“From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.”
—Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet
Unusual animals and insects fly and creep and slither through a number of Sherlock Holmes stories. The snake coils in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” the jellyfish lies in wait in “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” and the haunting hound terrifies the peasants in The Hound of the Baskervilles. But the bizarre animals are not there just to frighten—they are foils for scientific inquiry. Conan Doyle repeatedly describes these creatures as being pursued by eccentric amateur naturalists who are eager to capture and classify them and their habitats.
Conan Doyle often used odd bits of scientific atmosphere to dramatic advantage. In “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” he describes the surroundings of a gentleman scientist:
The general effect, however, was amiable, though eccentric. The room was as curious as its occupant. It looked like
31
a small museum. It was both broad and deep, with cupboards and cabinets all round, crowded with specimens, geological and anatomical. Cases of butterflies and moths flanked each side of the entrance. A large table in the center was littered with all sorts of debris, while the tall brass tube of a powerful microscope bristled up among them.
There were many such intense students of science in the days of the Holmes stories. The nineteenth century was a period of enormous interest in exploring the natural world. Conan Doyle, along with many of his contemporaries, frequented lectures on the subject and was fascinated by the theories of Charles Darwin and his followers.
In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Stapleton, the naturalist, is described on the moor incautiously ignoring the dangers of the treacherous terrain: “[A] small fly or moth had fluttered across our path, and in an instant Stapleton was rushing with extraordinary energy and speed in pursuit of it.”
Stapleton, we are told, believes the insect to be a “Cyclopides.” This specimen is not found on English moors, so his passionate haste is understandable. The Baskerville moor, as Conan Doyle described it, is extraordinary in another way, as it harbors a number of orchids within its wild and forbidding landscape.
The mention of an orchid and a moth in the same story must have reminded many of the original readers of the hound tale of the strange prediction Charles Darwin had made thirty-eight years before. Darwin firmly believed that insects and plants coevolved and were interdependent. On examining an unusual orchid from Madagascar called the star or Christmas orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale), which possesses a nectar spur almost twelve inches long, Darwin postulated that somewhere in Madagascar there must exist a moth with a proboscis, or noselike part, that is almost a foot long to allow it to reach the bottom of the nectar spur and so pollinate the orchid. He published this idea in 1862, in his work “On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects,” in which he states:
[I]n Madagascar there must be moths with the proboscis capable of extension to a length of between ten and eleven inches! …
The pollinia would not be withdrawn until some huge moth, with a wonderfully long proboscis, tried to drain the last drop. If such great moths were to become extinct in Madagascar, assuredly the Angraecum would become extinct.
Charles Darwin died in 1882, still believing in the existence of the extraordinary moth, although it had never been found. His theory was considered by many an amusing fancy, but the creative, confident reasoning from a small bit of evidence was typically Sherlockian.
Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle tells us, demanded acute observation, accurate data, and careful method. This was precisely the view of the dedicated amateur naturalists of the period. The collection, study, and classification of insects and plants, and the systematic reasoning based on the information so gathered had great implications for evolving forensic science.
Naturalists observed that there were millions of species of insects. They were ubiquitous as well. Many too tiny to notice, they still left traces of themselves in the form of larvae and exudates as they invaded homes, populated gardens, and intruded even into medical consulting rooms, laboratories, and hospitals. They were found on the carcasses of animals and on the corpses of humans. Clearly, these creatures were often present at the scene of violent crime. Could science find a way to make these silent witnesses give testimony?
Although this was a new concept in most of Europe, it had actually been put to use in China as far back as A.D. 1235. A death investigator named Sung T’zu, the author of the earliest known work on forensic investigation (the title of which is usually translated as The Washing Away of Wrongs), described a case in a small village in which a man was slashed to death. The shape and depth of the fatal injury indicated that it had been inflicted by a farmer’s sickle. When questioned, the villagers denied all knowledge of the crime.
The investigator demanded that all of the townspeople bring their sickles to the central square and lay them on the ground. The tools all appeared to be clean. But tiny flies gathered, hovered hungrily, and then, buzzing with appetite, landed on one blade. They were evidently attracted by the minute traces of blood and tissue that scented the instrument. The owner of the weapon confessed.
In the West until the seventeenth centur
y, insect activity had been observed but misinterpreted. It was known for centuries that many insects had hallucinogenic or poisonous effects if ingested. They were often ingredients in elaborate recipes for magical potions that were meant to seduce or to kill. In rural England, a tradition persisted that if a family member died, the bees on the property must be informed, or they would leave the hives in anger and deprive the bereaved of their honey. It was firmly believed that flies and maggots as well as bees and beetles generated spontaneously from decaying flesh. (This, of course, was an ancient idea, represented in the Bible by the tale of Samson finding the carcass of a lion he had slain filled with bees and honey.)
The first experiment on record to examine the validity of this theory was performed in 1668 by a physician and poet from Arezzo, Italy, named Francesco Redi. He had observed that meat that butchers and hunters had covered had fewer maggots than meat that was displayed unwrapped.
Redi filled three jars with putrid meat. He left one open, covered the mouth of the second with gauze fabric, and covered the third jar tightly. After several days, Redi found that the flesh in the open jar was covered with maggots. The jar covered with gauze had attracted flies, but the meat was without maggot activity. The covered jar had been untouched. Redi concluded that maggots were immature flies and that flies laid eggs on decaying meat.
The realization that some insects breed in decaying flesh and that they totally change form as they mature was a new idea. If it could be determined exactly how each type of insect colonized the dead, and if the length of time it took to do so could be accurately predicted, it might prove a valuable tool in establishing time of death in a homicide.
