The Calendar of Scottish Crime. Advocate, who in this trial sanctioned this weighty innovation by allowing Liston to produce witnesses before the jury, to such good effect that he was unanimously ac quitted. Henceforward the jurors were constituted judges of the law as well as of the fact, a charge to which may be traced about this time a growing tendency in counsel to in dulge in hair-splitting arguments about the exact meaning of legal terms. Thus in 1618, one of the many individuals, honest and otherwise, who have borne the name of Wal ter Scott, was tried for the " mutilation " of John Dalgleish by striking of three fingers of his left hand. The act was not denied; the two men had fought; Scott got a bloody sconce, and Dalgleish had the misfortune to lose three fingers. But Mr. Thomas Nicolsone, " Advocat," counsel for the defense, argued at great length that the charge should be quashed because here was no mutilation. "MuÜüatío" he maintained, "es( tantum amfuiatio numbri, and a finger is not legally a ' mem ber.' Thair is na member suttit af, ffor the persewaris haill hand, and fingers thairof, are vit extant be occulour inspectioun, . . . and he is able to grip thairwith. . . . The finger is nocht membriim, bot pars metnbi i, as sayis Baldus;
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Let every man have his due: though the justiciary records of this reign contain enough to sicken any reader (the cases quoted above are not one whit more horrible than many others), and make it difficult to realise that less than three centuries intervene between the Jubilee of James VI. in 1617 and the Dia mond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897, still allowance must be made for the influence on a pious monarch of the spiritual teaching of the time. If the king degraded his office by pandering to a dark superstition, much more must the ministers of religion be held blamable for inciting him to sinister activity. The persecution of witches in Scotland was scarcely heard of till after the Reformation; and it was carried on with relentless zeal all through the Covenanting times. James had been five-and-twenty years in his grave when, on April 2, 1659, ten women were tried to gether at Dumfries on a charge of witchcraft. Nine were convicted, and the presbytery ap pointed eight ministers "that they be assist ing to the brethren of Dumfries and Gallo way the day of the execution." All nine were publicly burnt at Dumfries together.1 What terms could be found to express our horror for the organisers of such a holocaust had it taken place in darkest Africa? Yet these ministers thought they were doing God service : they had scripture at their fingerends, and had not St. Paul enumerated witch craft among the works of the flesh?
and so on with interminable length and inge nuity, which would have afforded infinite pleas ure to King Jamie, had he not been absent in London at the time. The jury took a very HERBERT MAXWELL. commonplace view, that the destruction of IN BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE. three fingers amounted to mutilation, and convicted Scott; but the matter was finally 1 Macdowall's History of Dumfries. settled by arbitration of " my Lord of Balcleuche" (Buccleuch).
