second by a flash of lightning. A Frenchman
travelling was fired at from a ditch. Both he and
his servant swore to the man who, they said,
had fired; his face being discerned by the flash of
his gun. The man was condemned, but
pardoned, when, on an experiment being made in
the Imperial College of France, it was declared
that the flash from a discharged gun did not give
light enough for the identification of the person
firing. But there are facts tending the other
way, and Dr. Gray, in the second edition of his
book on Forensic Medicine, just published, the
latest and best authority on these subjects, and
the volume from which we are taking all the
anecdotes we tell, says that he has repeatedly
recognised a face with which he was familiar by
the discharge in the dark of a gun close at hand.
"It may also," he very rightly adds, " be
reasonably contended that, under the influence
of strong excitement, the perceptions are
uncommonly acute, as the actions are unusually
rapid. It might happen, therefore, that a
person exposed to danger would have a quicker
and more distinct perception than an
experimenter." Thus, for example, at the end of the
last century, on a November night, three Bow-
street runners, who had been sent to search the
neighbourhood of Hounslow, were in a post-
chaise together, and were attacked on the high-
way, near Bedfont, by two persons on horse-
back, one of whom placed himself at the heads
of the horses, the other at the side of the chaise.
The night was dark, but one of the officers
swore that, by the flash of the pistols, he could
distinctly see that the man rode a dark brown
horse, between thirteen and fourteen hands high,
and of remarkable shape, having a square head
and very thick shoulders—altogether, a horse
that he could have picked out from among fifty.
He did find the horse, and of the rider he could
also testify that he had worn a rough-shag brown
great-coat.

Identification after death has also its difficulties.
A resurrection-man was found guilty of
raising the body of a young woman buried at
Stirling. The body was identified by her relations,
not only by the features, but by the fact of one leg
being shorter than the other. But it was afterwards
shown that, although the man really had
lifted the body at Stirling, the body identified
by the relations was that of another young
woman taken out of the churchyard at Falkirk,
and she also, besides the general resemblance, had
one leg shorter than the other. The body of
Maria Martin was identified by the absence of
certain teeth from each jaw, and by signs about
the lungs, answering to an attack of inflammation
of the chest, which she was known to have
had shortly before her mysterious disappearance.
Peculiarities of teeth and jaw are often important
means of identification, especially where
during life a cast happens to have been taken by
a dentist. When the remains of Charles the
First were exhumed, they were identified, not
only by the preservation of the features, and
striking likeness to the portrait on coins,
busts, and paintings, but there was a smooth cut
such as a heavy axe would have made, through
the substance of the fourth spinal bone of the
neck.

If we are not always sure that we identify a
man, can we be sure always that we read the
riddle of a disease? Of scientific difficulty in
the distinguishing of natural signs, we will say
nothing, and we will suppose that few doctors
can mistake a rabbit's kidney stuffed into the
nose for polypus, or a preparation of cow's
sweetbread for a cancer. Such frauds are
profitable, under occasional circumstances, to
others besides those who wish to escape
military service,—so profitable sometimes, that
disease is imitated at the cost of not a little
torture, and the deception carried on in spite of
the sharpest remedies. When a curved spine is
imitated, there is only the one possible position
for the curve, and the twist causes folds of skin
that are hardly to be traced in the case of a real
old curviture. Ulcers are not only imitated by
gluing a bit of spleen, or of the skin of a frog,
to the part chosen for the seat of disease, and
keeping it moist with blood and water; they are
created by burning and the use of corrosives,
and the healing of them is prevented by the use
of irritants. An obstinate sore leg has, therefore,
now and then been cured by locking it up
in a box. But people who will gorge shell-fish
for the sake of getting nettle-rash, and who give
themselves the itch by rubbing irritating powder
into needle pricks, who drink vinegar and burnt
cork to upset the bowels, put lime into their
eyes for the sake of getting them inflamed, or
even thrust a needle down to the lens of the eye
to get a cataract—these are samples of things
that have been actually done to escape military
service—might well perplex the unwary. Feigned
epileptics will swallow blood to vomit it again;
will display real old bruises self-inflicted; will fall,
struggle, and foam chewed-soap at the mouth.
In true epilepsy, there is insensibility to pain.
Feigned victims have borne pin-thrusts without
a wince, but they seldom can stand flecking
with a wet handkerchief on the naked soles of
their feet. One man who feigned a death sleep,
suffered the operation of trephining, the sawing
of a circlet of bone out of his skull, with only a
groan. A recruit, who feigned blindness, being
placed on the brink of a river, was ordered to
walk forward, and he did. Fever has been
imitated by eating tobacco; hectic on the cheek
produced by rubbing; a white tongue made with
chalk or whiting; a brown tongue with liquorice
or brick-dust. But of all imitable things the
only one in which fraud is not tolerably easy of
detection by a well-trained and shrewd doctor,
is the complaint of pain. Pain in the head,
rheumatic and neuralgic pain, will really occur
without visible change in the parts affected and
without constitutional symptoms. In the
persistent false assertion of severe pain, men have
allowed a breast to be cut out, or a limb
amputated. There is not only in these cases a
purpose to be observed, but an obstinacy of
character that prides itself on going through with
what it has begun.