Alfred Swaine Taylor was the most famous forensic scientist of his day specializing in uncovering murders by poison. He was also a pioneer of photogenic drawing, and published in London in 1840 a thirty-seven-page publication entitled On the Art of Photogenic Drawing. In the paper he explained how he had tried Talbot's method of obtaining photogenic drawings, and "From the unsatisfactory results in pursuing Mr. Talbot's directions, I was induced after many trials to adopt the process about to be described". Taylor gives all credit to Talbot for the original discovery and with modesty declines to claim originality for his own process of preserving drawings, which he believed was identical to that process pursued by Sir John Herschel. From the experiments that he began in February 1839 he concluded that ammonio-nitrate was the best liquid for preserving photogenic drawings and that by washing the drawing in near boiling water and applying hyposulphite of soda or lime, the image was preserved even from sunlight. Taylor's enthusiasm for photography never left him, although he seems to have abandoned serious experimentation in 1840.