ith all that is said and with all
that is written. I was in the service of the Academy when your beautiful
work was crowned, and when the perpetual secretary spoke of those
Magistrates who knew how to unite the love of letters with a study of
justice; I thought that lower down, much lower down on the ladder, M. le
Juge, he might have also searched for and found some men who studied to
learn and to do their best in doing their duty."

"Ah! I know you, Bernardet. Your chief has often spoken of you."

"I know that M. Leriche is very good to me. But it is not for me to
boast of that. I wish only to inspire confidence in you, because what I
wish to say to you is so strange--so very strange"----

Bernardet suddenly stopped. "I know," he began, "that if I were to say
to a physician what I am about to say to you he would think I ought to
be shut up in Sainte-Anne. And yet I am not crazy, I beg of you to
believe. No! but I have searched and searched. It seems to me that there
is a mass of inventions, of discoveries, which we police officers ought
to make use of. And, although I am a sub-Inspector"----

"Go on! Go on!" said the Magistrate, quickly, with a movement of the
head toward the open door of the salon, where the Attorney for the
Republic was conducting the investigation, and his nod seemed to say:
"They are at work in there--let us make haste."

"I will be as brief as possible," said Bernardet, who understood what he
meant.

"Monsieur," (and his tone became rapid, precise, running up and down
like a ball), "thirty years, or, rather, to be exact, twenty-six years
ago, some American journals, not political, but scientific, published
the fact that the daguerrotype--we have made long strides since then in
photography--had permitted them to find in the retina of a murdered
man's eye the image of the one who struck him."

"Yes, I know," said M. Ginory.

"In 1860, I was too young, and I had no desire to prove the truth of
this discovery. I adore photography as I adore my profession. I pass my
leisure hours in taking instantaneous pictures, in developing them,
printing, and finishing them. The idea of what I am about to propose to
you came to me by chance. I bought upon one of the quays a volume of the
Societe de Medicine Legale of 1869, in which Dr. Vernois gives an
account of a communication sent to the society by a physician, who also
sent photographic proofs, thus indorsed: 'Photographs taken of the
retina of a woman