t, you see the person fall a lifeless corpse; and you infer,
from all these circumstances, that there was a ball discharged from the
gun, which entered his body and caused his death, because such is the
usual and natural cause of such an effect. But you did not see the ball
leave the gun, pass through the air, and enter the body of the
slain; and your testimony to the fact of killing is, therefore, only
inferential,--in other words, circumstantial. It is possible that no
ball was in the gun; and we infer that there was, only because we cannot
account for death on any other supposition." [Chief Justice Gibson, in
Am. Law Journal, vol. vi. p. 123.]

"The question always comes to this: Is the circumstance of intercourse
with the sick followed by the appearance of the disease in a proportion
of cases so much greater than any other circumstance common to any
portion of the inhabitants of the place under observation, as to make it
inconceivable that the succession of cases occurring in persons having
that intercourse should have been the result of chance? If so, the
inference is unavoidable, that that intercourse must have acted as a
cause of the disease. All observations which do not bear strictly
on that point are irrelevant, and, in the case of an epidemic first
appearing in a town or district, a succession of two cases is sometimes
sufficient to furnish evidence which, on the principle I have stated, is
nearly irresistible."

Possibly an inexperienced youth may be awe-struck by the quotation from
Cuvier. These words, or their equivalent, are certainly to be found in
his Introduction. So are the words "top not come down"! to be found in
the Bible, and they were as much meant for the ladies' head-dresses as
the words of Cuvier were meant to make clinical observation wait for a
permit from anybody to look with its eyes and count on its fingers. Let
the inquiring youth read the whole Introduction, and he will see what
they mean.

I intend no breach of courtesy, but this is a proper place to warn the
student against skimming the prefaces and introductions of works for
mottoes and embellishments to his thesis. He cannot learn anatomy by
thrusting an exploring needle into the body. He will be very liable
to misquote his author's meaning while he is picking off his outside
sentences. He may make as great a blunder as that simple prince who
praised the conductor of his orchestra for the piece just before the
overture; the music