A SINGULAR STORY.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 3159, 18 May 1883, Page 2

A SINGULAR STORY.

Some years ago a poor woman was discovered lying dead on the floor of her room in a low part of Westminster, with such marks of violence on her body—notably a deep longitudinal out on the head which had incised the bone of the skull itself—as to point, to the conclusion that she had been the victim of foul play. Her husband was taken into custody, and put upon trial for murder. In making his defence, ho accounted for the bruises, bloodstains, and other collateral evidence in various plausible ways ; and for the scalpwound by showing that the room was an attic with a broken skylight in the roof and insinuating that a sharpedged piece of glass must have fallen on his wife’s head as she stood underneath. The sbrgedn who had been called in to view the body, in giving his evidence, expressed his opinion that- a piece of glass, in falling, would not have sufficient force to cut into a bone. Notwithstanding this and other facts tending to prove that there was no moral doubt as to the guilt of the accased, the balance of legal testimony against him was not strong enough to convict, and he escaped. The surgeon —long since risen to the top of the professional tree, and now a man of European repute—was at that time curator of an anotomioal museum, where, in the department devoted to zoology and comparative anatomy, stood the skeleton of a cow, A few weeks after the trial above quoted, a very violent thunderstorm, accompanied by hail, hurst over London one night, and much damage was done ; amongst other things, the museum skylights were extensively shattered. When the curator arrived next morning, he found & speculum of broken ; glass actually sticking upright in the very edge of one of the sharp prominences of bone—technically the spincm processes —projecting from the verteoras of the cow I I have often heard him narrate the incident at lecture, as a warning to young men against conclusions jumped at on the strength of preconceived ideas, instead of patient investigation and experiment. The wound in the woman’s skull might after all, have been produced by falling glass. —“ Chamber’s Journal.”