upon the trial of a private soldier, on a charge
of which he was convicted, of having wilfully
destroyed an Enfield rifle; and on which
proceedings his excellency feels himself constrained
to make the following observations:

"Three witnesses deposed to having seen
the prisoner 'break' the rifle, but they do not
describe the nature of injury done; a fourth
witness deposed to the cost of a new and
complete rifle. The prisoner then proposed the
following question to this witness: 'Is the
rifle now on the table wholly destroyed?' This
question, a negative reply to which it was much
to the prisoner's advantage to obtain, the court
would not allow the witness to answer.

"The very issue before the court was,
whether the rifle had or had not been destroyed.
By refusing to receive evidence on that point
the conviction has been invalidated, and the
soldier has not improbably suffered wrong. If
the rifle had been actually destroyed, there
should not have been even hesitation in receiving
testimony to that effect; but if it had been only
damaged, and could be repaired, and again made
serviceable, it was the duty of the court to have
elicited the fact, recorded a verdict in accordance,
and awarded stoppages only to the extent
necessary for effecting the repairs.

"It may have been the case that the rifle
was actually destroyed, and could not be made
serviceable again, and that the officers sitting on
the court-martial perceived this by their own
personal observation; but, nevertheless, they
completely lost sight of the fact that without
recorded evidence on the point, it would be
altogether out of the power of the confirming officer
to form an accurate judgment as to the correctness
or otherwise of the conviction.

"Neither is the officer who did confirm the
conviction exempt from blame. He should have
perceived the deficiency of proof, and it was his
duty to have reassembled the court for revision,
in order to obtain a finding consistent with the
evidence.

"There having been no evidence on the face
of the proceedings that the prisoner had destroyed
a rifle, the Commander-in-Chief has annulled the
conviction of that offence, and has directed, in
the Adjutant-General's department, that the
soldier may be immediately restored to his duty,
and that the entries of the conviction be
cancelled in the regimental records."

BRAIN SPECTRES.

THE brain makes ghosts both sleeping and
waking. A man was lying in troubled sleep
when a phantom, with the cold hand of a corpse,
seized his right arm. Awaking in horror, he
found upon his arm still the impression of the
cold hand of the corpse, and it was only after
reflecting that he found the terrible apparition
to be due to the deadening of his own left
hand in a frosty night, which had subsequently
grasped his right arm. This was a real ghost
of the brain, which the awakening of the senses
and the understanding explained. M. Gratiolet
narrates a dream of his own which is singularly
illustrative of how the brain makes ghosts in
sleep. Many years ago, when occupied in
studying the organisation of the brain, he
prepared a great number both of human and
animal brains. He carefully stripped off the
membranes, and placed the brains in alcohol.
Such were his daily occupations, when one
night he thought that he had taken out his
own brain from his own skull. He stripped
it of its membranes. He put it into alcohol,
and then he fancied he took his brain out of
the alcohol and replaced it in his skull. But,
contracted by the action of the spirit, it was
much reduced in size, and did not at all fill up
the skull. He felt it shuffling about in his
head. This feeling threw him into such a great
perplexity that he awoke with a start, as if
from nightmare.

M. Gratiolet, every time he prepared the
brain of a man, must have felt that his own
brain resembled it. This impression awakening
in a brain imperfectly asleep, whilst neither
the senses nor the judgment were active, the
physiologist carried on an operation in his
sleep which probably had often occurred to his
fancy when at his work, and which had then
been summarily dismissed very frequently. A
pursuit which had at last become one of routine,
and the association of himself with his study,
explain the bizarre and ghastly dream of M.
Gratiolet. A sensation from the gripe of a cold
hand, misinterpreted by the imagination acting
without the aid of the discerning faculties,
accounts for the ghastly vision of the other
sleeper.

Every one is conscious of a perpetual series
of pictures, sometimes stationary, sometimes
fleeting, generally shifting; yet occasionally
fixed in his mind. Sleep is the period in which
the nerves derive their nourishment from the
blood. The picturing nerves, like those of
the senses, are generally inactive in their
functions at feeding times; and thoroughly
healthy nervous systems, dream very little or
not at all. Dreams betoken troubled brains.
The brain of a woman who had lost a portion of
her cranium used to swell up and protrude
when she was dreaming, and then contract and
become tranquil again when she was sleeping
soundly.

The wakeful senses, the active judgment, and
the will even of the strongest and soundest
minds, are not always able to control the false
and perverse impressions of the nerves. I knew
once a commander in the navy whose left eye
was shot clean out by a bullet in a naval action
in the beginning of this century, and whom,
forty years afterwards, it was impossible to
convince that he did not see all sorts of strange
objects with his lost eye. " It is not
impossible," he would quietly say; " I know it too
well." Everybody has known men who suffered
rheumatism in legs long lost and replaced by
wooden ones.

A nervous, dreamy, imaginative lad was walking