“3 THe Microscope. 
identified by others and myself as fine hairs from a human 
head. By comparison, they were in every respect precisely 
like hairs taken from the head of deceased. In the case of an 
alleged murder in Connecticut, where the charred bodies of two 
women had been found in the debris of their dwelling which 
had burned to the ground, I was employed by the state to make 
an examination of certain pieces of half burned cloth, some 
partly singed hair, and numerous other fragmentary substances. 
I found considerable blood in unburned portions of the cloth, 
but owing to the high temperature to which it had been ex- 
posed, the corpuscles could not be sufficiently restored to de- 
termine, even approximately by the aid of micrometry, whether 
they were human or animal origin, and it was not known 
whether there was an animal in the house at the time of the 
fire, or not. I found, however, some hair which had been 
matted together by blood previous to its being heated, and was 
able in that case to show that the hair was from the head of an 
adult dark-complexioned person. 
(Juite recently I examined a knife which was supposed to 
have been used by an accused person as the weapon in an 
alleged murder. On its blade were stains resembling dried 
blood, and in one of these stains were a number of hair-like 
filaments, which, under an ordinary pocket magnifier, closely 
resembled soft, downy human hair. Further examination 
showed them to be cotton. 
In cases of forensic microscopy the importance of a care- 
ful examination of all minute fibers found upon weapons cannot 
be too strongly insisted upon. A case is related where a razor 
was found which belonged to a prisoner, on which were some 
small fibers imbedded in blood, which, examined under a high 
magnifying power, proved to be cotton. In cutting the throat 
of his victim, the murderer has also cut through the cotton 
strings of her nightcap. The similarity of the cotton fibers on 
the razor belonging to the prisoner and those of the strings on 
the deceased woman’s nightcap was fully established. (Tidy’s 
Legal Med., vol. I, p. 572.) 
In another case, a knife which had been used to inflict a 
fatal wound, and which had been wiped afterward, contained 
in its depressions and irregularities, as well as between the 
