The Dr. Tumblety who was arrested in London a few days ago on suspicion of complicity in the Whitechapel murders, and who when proved innocent of that charge was held for trial in the Central Criminal Court under the special law covering the offenses disclosed in the late "Modern Babylon" scandal, will be remembered by any number of Brooklynites and New-Yorkers as Dr. Blackburn, the Indian herb doctor. He is the fellow who in 1861 burst upon the people of Brooklyn as a sort of modern Count of Monte Cristo. He was of striking personal appearance, being considerably over six feet in height, of graceful and powerful build, with strongly marked features, beautifully clear complexion, a sweeping mustache, and jet-black hair. He went dashing about the streets mounted on a handsome light chestnut horse, and dressed in the costliest and most elaborate riding costumes, and soon had a stream of customers at his office and laboratory on Fulton-street, near the City Hall. In these rides he was invariably accompanied by a valet as handsomely appareled and horsed as himself, and a brace of superb English greyhounds. He boarded with a Mrs. Foster, at 95 Fulton-street, then a fashionable quarter of the city, and cut a wide swath in the affections of the feminine lodgers.
After a few months he dropped out of sight as suddenly and as mysteriously as he had appeared and was next heard of as being implicated in the famous "yellow fever importation" and "black bag" plots that the rebel sympathizers tried to develope in New-York during the civil war. It was at this time that his relation to the celebrated Blackburn family of Kentucky became known, and he thereafter went by his real name instead of his curious assumed name, Tumblety. His interest in the two previously-mentioned plots was, luckily for him, so slight that he was allowed to go unpunished, while several of his associates did not get off so easily. For several years after this he kept pretty well out of the public gaze, and then suddenly took up his herb-doctoring business with its attendant swagger again. He visited both this city and Brooklyn at about semi-yearly intervals and became a member of several questionable clubs. He dropped out of sight some 10 years ago, and the first that has been heard of him since is the news of his arrest and imprisonment in London.
