Practical Tests in Evidence. collar-bone. On the trial the defendant's counsel made proferí of the animal; and he came into court, with bells on his head, with out injury to anybody, but with manifest benefit to his side of the case, for an " ar rangement" was immediately had. The judge observed in the happiest manner that "the elephant had come to offer his apology in person; " whereupon there was laughter among the bar, as there always is in England at any attempt at a judicial joke, which in this country would make the lawyers look funereal. In the chapter on Inspection, in the new edition of his work on Evidence, Dr. Wharton tells of a case of Mrs. Wolfe, a widow, who sued one Jones, a butcher, for ¿5 damages, for killing a cockatoo parrot belonging to her. The defendant insisted that he mistook it for an owl. On the trial the mate of the deceased was brought into court, and afforded great amusement by strongly recommending the parties to "shake hands," " shut up," and asking for " sugar." Wicked men would doubtless say that the parrot with its garrulity felt more at home among the lawyers than the elephant with his sagacity. EXPERIMENTS. Experiments may be tried, out of court or in court, to illustrate certain scientific mat ters. Thus in Sullivan v. Commonwealth, 93 Penn. St. 284, evidence was admitted of experiments by shooting at short range with the pistol in question, at substances like the clothing which the deceased wore when killed. So in Dillard v. State, 58 Miss. 368, a case of homicide, the jury were permitted to inspect the horse which the deceased was riding at the time of his death, and to experi ment with a view of ascertaining whether the wounds could have been inflicted by a man on the ground. So in Lincoln v. Taunton Manuf. Co., 9 Allen, 191, evidence was allowed of experiments by expert chemists, out of court, as to the effect of copper on grass, disapproving Ingelow v. North R. Co.,
7 Gray, 91, where such evidence was excluded in respect to the freezing of milk. Locksmiths have been permitted to give ex hibitions of lock-picking in open court. In a case in the United States Supreme Court, on the question whether in a photograph of sev eral persons, sitting in a row, the outer images would be as vivid and correct as those in the centre, the experiment was tried on the judges sitting on the bench in open court, by their own direction. In recent English cases, Kay, J., tolerated an exhibition of dancing-dolls, and on a ques tion of patent right between two rival manu facturers of hand-organs, Kekewich, J., or dered both organs played in court. James Payn, in a recent letter to "The Indepen dent," says : — "There is a veil-known classical story of a gen tleman boasting of a leap he had once made at Rome, which seemed to be a little incredible. ' Here is Rome, here is the leap,' observed a bystander, —-a practical suggestion which put the boaster to shame. A similar attempt was made the other day in a county court to throw doubt upon an athletic performance, but by no means with the same success. A young lady, whose pro fession was that of raising heavy weights by her teeth, sued for money owed by her employer, whose defence was that she was incompetent to perform her feats. She showed her shining teeth, and looked round at the shrinking counsel and solicitors; she would probably have had one of them by the nape of the neck, had not his honor hastily suggested that an inanimate object would be equally suitable for the experiment. A cannon was brought weighing one hundred and twenty pounds, which the young lady lifted with her teeth and held suspended for ever so long; then she let it fall to the ground with a thud, to prove that it was no ' property ' cannon. It is hardly necessary to say that the jury, treated to this successful and gratuitous performance, gave her a verdict at once, not ' in the teeth of the evidence,' but on the evidence of her teeth.
In the recent English case of Belt v. Lawes, the plaintiff, a sculptor, sued the "Vanity Fair" newspaper for libel in alleging
