Step 1: Get the poisons of the dart.
This can be done with an isopropanol swab, perhaps. Or washing the dart with acetone. Anything volatile will work. We had to assume that the poisons used were not a volatile as isopropanol or acetone.

Step 2: Separate your mixture into its compounds.
So now you have a mixture of solvents and poisons, not to mention some of Zam's blood. Take this mixture and spot a chromatographic plate. Stick the plate in a small amount of polar solvent, some kind of alcohol maybe, and the more polar compounds in your mixture will move up the plate with the alcohol while the less polar compounds will not move as far. This is called Thin-Layer Chromatography (TLC). It works well.

Step 3: Identify the compounds in your mixture.
You can scratch the spots on your chromatography plate. You can see these spots under UV light. Know what your plate was made of so you can ignore the signals from that compound, because now you're going to identify your unknown. Here are some ways you could do it:

(a) Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectroscopy
You're not getting your compound back after this one, but what you do get is absolutely no interfernce from what your plate was made of, and an exact number of every kind of element that is in your compound. No structural information though.

(b) Infrared Spectroscopy
This is non-destructive, but will have a lot of interference if the compound isn't pure. You can get some information about structure, but you better have a pretty good idea of what your compound is, or else you're going to spend a lot of time looking at IR spectra.

(c) Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
My personal favorite. With this you can have a complete unknown and discover the structure of any organic molecule. And it's non-destructive! Impurities may interfere, but if you know what they are, they can be ignored. Hooray for NMR!

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