CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE. 187 



says that great man, " bespeaks the structure of the articulation of 

 the jaw, that of the scapula that of the claws, just as the equation 

 of a curve involves all its properties ; and in taking each property 

 separately as the basis of a particular equation, we should find again 

 both the ordinary equation and all the other certain properties." We 

 may corroborate and illustrate this remark by a case more immedi- 

 ately connected with our subject — that of Eugene Aram, whose 

 eventful story has given birth to one of the most interesting of mo- 

 dern novels, and who was tried in 1759 for the murder, about four- 

 teen years before, of Daniel Clark. It is a fact in our nature that 

 there is a general and involuntary tendency to truth and consisten- 

 cy, except where the mind is resolved upon concealment. An ap- 

 parently slight circumstahce in the conduct of Houseman, his ac- 

 complice, led to Aram's conviction and execution. About thirteen 

 years after Clark w^as missing, a labourer, employed to dig for stone 

 to supply a lime-kiln near Knaresborough, discovered a human ske- 

 leton near the edge of the cliff. It soon became suspected that the 

 body was that of Clark, and the coroner held an inquest. Aram 

 and Houseman \vere the persons who had last been seen vvrith Clark 

 on the very night before he was missing. At the request of the 

 coroner. Houseman took up one of the bones, and in his confusion 

 dropped this unguarded expression, " This is no more Daniel Clark's 

 bone than it is mine ;" from which it was concluded that if he was 

 so certain that the bones before him were not those of Clark, he 

 could give some account of him. He was pressed with this obser- 

 vation, and, after various evasive accounts, he made a full confession 

 of the crime, and, search being made pursuant to his statement, the 

 skeleton of Clark was found in St. Robert's Cave, buried precisely 

 as he had described it. Sellis, who, in 1810, attempted to assassin 

 nate the Duke of Cumberland, was a left-handed man ; after hav- 

 ing made his attack he cut his own throat, and the razor with which 

 he committed the act was found lying by his left side. 



''True knowledge," says Bacon, "is the knowledge of causes;" 

 and in moral no less than in physical science, we can hope to discover 

 the relation of cause and effect only by following the inductive 

 process so successfully pursued in all other philosophical researches. 

 But when the inductive process is concluded, we may test the truth 

 of our conclusions by reversing our previous course of proceedinii" 

 and reasoning synthetically, from cause to effect. If our judgment 

 be correct, it must not only comport with, but satisfactorily account 

 for, all the facts, however numerous, to the exclusion of every other 

 reasonable hypothesis ; and if the facts be rationally explicable by 



