<P> In Warwick 1816, a farm laborer was tried and convicted of the murder of a young maidservant . She had been drowned in a shallow pool and bore the marks of violent assault . The police found footprints and an impression from corduroy cloth with a sewn patch in the damp earth near the pool . There were also scattered grains of wheat and chaff . The breeches of a farm labourer who had been threshing wheat nearby were examined and corresponded exactly to the impression in the earth near the pool . </P> <P> A method for detecting arsenious oxide, simple arsenic, in corpses was devised in 1773 by the Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele . His work was expanded, in 1806, by German chemist Valentin Ross, who learned to detect the poison in the walls of a victim's stomach . </P> <P> James Marsh was the first to apply this new science to the art of forensics . He was called by the prosecution in a murder trial to give evidence as a chemist in 1832 . The defendant, John Bodle, was accused of poisoning his grandfather with arsenic - laced coffee . Marsh performed the standard test by mixing a suspected sample with hydrogen sulfide and hydrochloric acid . While he was able to detect arsenic as yellow arsenic trisulfide, when it was shown to the jury it had deteriorated, allowing the suspect to be acquitted due to reasonable doubt . </P> <P> Annoyed by that, Marsh developed a much better test . He combined a sample containing arsenic with sulfuric acid and arsenic - free zinc, resulting in arsine gas . The gas was ignited, and it decomposed to pure metallic arsenic, which, when passed to a cold surface, would appear as a silvery - black deposit . So sensitive was the test, known formally as the Marsh test, that it could detect as little as one - fiftieth of a milligram of arsenic . He first described this test in The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1836 . </P>

When was science first used to solve crimes