the usual precautions of concealment, and more especially from those artful measures by which the designing assassin seeks to cast an impenetrable veil over the more direct evidences of his crime.
1. Circumstances to be learnt by the Inspection of the Body.
That the inspection of the body could furnish the satisfactory means of discovering the cause of its death, is an opinion which has been very naturally entertained from the earliest ages; although it is easy to perceive that the extent and just value of the indications, which such a practice is capable of affording, could never have been appreciated until the more advanced periods of physiological knowledge.
As the ancients exposed their sick on the high roads, for the advantage of receiving from the casual passenger his opinion and experience respecting the particular malady under which they laboured, so did they expose the bodies of persons, supposed to have been murdered, in order that each spectator might candidly observe their appearance, and freely inquire into the circumstances which attended their decease; thus, as we are informed by Pliny, was the body of Genucius, a tribune of the Roman people, on his being found dead in bed, brought forth to the assembled multitude, who, unable to discover any external marks of violence, pronounced his death to have been a visitation of the gods; and we learn from Tacitus, that the remains of Germanicus, who was poisoned by Piso, were exposed in the market place of Antioch; thus too, in conformity with ancient custom, was the bleeding corpse of Julius Cæsar exposed to public gaze and animadversion.
