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a Sicilian woman named Tofana at the end of the seventeenth century to dispatch no fewer than 600 souls. The Marchioness de Brinvilliers was a notorious poisoner in seventeenth-century France. Charles Darwin’s thesis of natural selection—the “survival of the fittest,” as the philosopher Herbert Spencer put it—was sometimes popularly interpreted to describe a direct and ruthless struggle for the resources that support life, evoked by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his line “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Thomas Malthus predicted disastrous results when populations grew faster than the food supply, which would produce strife among peoples. The last item is a series of sensational crimes the public still remembered seventy-five years later—the “7 Pear Tree Murders,” which took place in 1811 on Ratcliff Highway in the East End of London.

10 (p. 55) From the Sierra Nevada . . . silence: American readers may be pardoned for raising both eyebrows at this wildly exaggerated description. Such fanciful notions of American geography were not uncommon among Europeans. Dickens sets part of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844) in the miasmal swamps a short train ride away from New York, and Puccini’s lovers in Manon Lescaut (1893) wander in the deserts outside New Orleans.

11 (p. 60) Joseph Smith: Joseph Smith (1805-1844), founder of the Mormons, was born in Palmyra, New York, where he experienced spiritual visions beginning at an early age. He established his church in Fayette, New York, in 1830 and moved west several times in search of freedom from persecution, ending up in Commerce, Illinois, which he renamed Nauvoo. After political squabbles and charges of corruption, he was murdered by a mob in 1844 at Carthage, Illinois. After Smith’s death, Brigham Young (1801-1877) became leader of the Mormons. He led the migration to Utah in 1846 and 1847, established a settlement at Salt Lake City, in a state the Mormons established and called Deseret, and later became governor of Utah.

12 (p. 68) Danite Band: Although such a group did exist, its activities were not nearly as sensational as those depicted here. The group existed for only a few months in 1838, and while it did retaliate against people who had run afoul of the Mormons, it was far from the bloodthirsty group portrayed in this story. Conan Doyle later apologized to the Mormons for this exaggeration when he spoke to them in Salt Lake City while on an American speaking tour.

13 (p. 101) wounded leg. I had a Jezail bullet through it: On page 7 of A Study in Scarlet this bullet was said to be in Watson’s shoulder. This discrepancy has fueled a minor industry of explanations, from the ingenious to the bizarre. The most probable is that Conan Doyle simply misremembered where he had located the wound. In only his second Sherlock Holmes story, he hadn’t foreseen that generations of sharp-eyed devotees would scan every line for inconsistencies with the fervor of medieval scholastics explicating Holy Writ.

14 (p. 114) a genuine Corot . . . that Salvator Rosa . . . the Bouguereau: This collection indicates that Sholto not only had fine taste in art, but the means to collect expensive works. Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875) was a French landscape painter of the Barbizon School; Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), from Naples, was known for landscapes and battle scenes; Adolph William Bouguereau (1825-1905), a French painter much admired in his day, is remembered now chiefly for his sentimental renderings of mythological scenes and for his strenuous opposition to the Impressionists.

15 (p. 119) Holmes declares . . . sedative: Holmes claims, probably facetiously, that Watson has reversed the dosages for these two drugs. Two drops of castor oil produce little effect, while large doses of strychnine are fatal.

16 (p. 138) Jean Paul: Pen name of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825), German novelist who was immensely popular in the nineteenth century. Holmes refers to one of his Analects entitled “The Grandeur of Man in His Littleness.’ Richter’s work was introduced to the English public by Thomas