ench language! And the dupe a highly educated mathematician of
European repute.

In the face of such incredible gullibility one is disposed to regard the
sentence of two years' imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs as
extravagantly severe, even despite the fact that Lucas received in all
over 140,000 francs from M. Chasles.

The Chatterton and Ireland forgeries are familiar to all educated
persons. These, however, hardly come under the head of the class of
fraud with which the ordinary forger is associated. In each of these
cases the motive of the deception was not so much to make money as a
literary reputation. In both cases presumably competent judges were
deceived. But the standard by which they gauged the genuineness of the
productions was not caligraphic, but literary. In neither instance was
there occasion or opportunity for the handwriting expert to exercise his
skill, for the sufficient reason that there existed no material with
which the writings could be compared. What the literary expert had to do
was to examine and compare the style of the compositions--a test in
which the idiosyncrasies and predilections of the judge played a leading
part.

Probably the greatest, and for a short time the most successful
autograph fraud perpetrated in Great Britain was that known as the case
of the Rillbank MSS., the detection and exposure of which were mainly
attributable to one of the authors of this work (Capt. W. W. Caddell).

Just before, and up till 1891, there was in Edinburgh a young man named
Alexander Howland Smith, who claimed to be the son of a reputable
Scottish law official, and a descendant of Sir Walter Scott.

On the strength of his presumed connection with the great novelist, he
had no difficulty in disposing of, to an Edinburgh bookseller, for
prices whose smallness alone should have excited suspicion, letters
purporting to be in the handwriting of Sir Walter Scott. Emboldened by
success, he embarked upon a wholesale manufacture of spurious letters
bearing the signatures of Burns, Edmund Burke, Sir Walter Scott, Grattan
and Thackeray. His principal victim was an Edinburgh chemist, Mr. James
Mackenzie, who, when the fraud was not only suspected, but proved,
distinguished himself by a stubborn and courageous defence of the
genuineness of the documents.

Smith's _modus operandi_ consisted in purchasing large-sized volumes of
the period of the subjects of his forgeries, and using the blank leaves
for th