is a phrase used in Germany to denote those parts of anatomical and physiological knowledge, which enable physicians and surgeons to decide certain causes as judges in courts of justice. In that country it has long been law and custom (if we mistake not, by the Caroline code of Charles V.) to refer cases of poisoning, child murder, rape, pregnancy, insanity, idiotism, &c. to the medical faculty, which, in the universities and some other great towns, is constituted into a kind of court for the trial of such questions. In this country there are no such courts; but in criminal trials medical gentlemen are often called upon to describe the symptoms of poisoning, child murder, rape, &c., and therefore it becomes them to obtain an accurate knowledge of these symptoms, and to store their memories with a number of minute facts, to which they may have occasion to appeal when giving their evidence.

The importance of this subject induced the professor of the institutes of physic in the university of Edinburgh to resolve lately to read an annual course of lectures on MEDICAL JURISPRUDENCE. This, we doubt not, will prove a valuable course; for though it is hardly conceivable that, under the head medical jurisprudence, any knowledge can be communicated which a well educated physician would not necessarily have acquired, without attending such a course; yet it is very obvious, that the recollection of the young physician may receive great aid from his listening to the well arranged lectures of an accurate professor. From these lectures he may store his mind with a collection of aphorisms which shall be always ready on the day of examination; or the lectures themselves may be delivered in questions and answers with all the formalities of a criminal court.

We have heard it observed, that to attend a course of such lectures would be of the utmost advantage to all who may be called upon to serve as jurymen in criminal trials; but of the truth of this observation we are more than doubtful. Persons who are only half instructed are always conceited of their own attainments; and men not acquainted with anatomy and physiology cannot be more than half instructed by the ablest course possible to be given of medical jurisprudence. Such persons indeed can hardly avoid mistaking the sense of the professor's language, however perspicuous that language may be. Of this we had lately a very striking instance. A gentleman, by no means illiterate, though a stranger to anatomical and physiological science, was expatiating to the writer of this article upon the general importance of medical jurisprudence, a course of which, he said, he had attended for the sole purpose of qualifying himself for discharging the important duties of a jurymen. Upon being asked what he had learned? he replied, that he had been taught, among other things which we thought frivolous, to discern, from the symptoms of hanging, whether the dead man had been hanged by himself or by another. We need not surely observe, that no such lesson was ever taught in any university, or by any medical lecturer; but it is worthy of consideration, whether lectures on medical jurisprudence may not have the most pernicious effects on the minds of men so little qualified as this gentleman to profit by them. To the regularly educated physician and surgeon such lectures may prove useful; to the plain citizen, not skilled in anatomy and physiology, they must prove dangerous; as their only tendency is to make him despise the evidence given before him by the regular physician or surgeon; to place implicit confidence in his own superficial knowledge; and thus to decide at random on the life or death of his fellow-creature:

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.