Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/502

486 Selecting one of the best scientists in the kingdom, they bade him investigate and prepare a remedy. The result was published in that book, Hassall's Adulterations Detected, a work that ought to make its author immortal. He there shows how all bodies differ in the minute structure of their granules, and renders it as easy to tell the genuine article from its adulterations as to tell apples from potatoes.

Some years ago a trial at Salem, N. Y., illustrated the value of science in questions of testimony. A man named Thomas Page, to gain possession of certain property, had forged a conveyance. The instrument purported to have been written in 1827, and was on paper colored blue with ultramarine. It was conclusively shown that ultramarine was not discovered until 1828, and not used in the manufacture of paper prior to 1841. By showing also that the paper was made on a Fourdrinier weaving-machine and by the calendering process, scientific and other evidence proved that it was probably not manufactured before 1845, and certainly could not have been in existence in 1827. The result was the overthrow of Page's suit, followed by his own prosecution, conviction, and sentence for forgery.

There was a time in the past history of the earth when, if a murderer could secretly place poison in the food of his victim, he might hope to accomplish his heinous purpose without fear of detection. Not so to-day. Chemical and microscopical analyses are applied to the stomach of the deceased, and with the symptoms reveal, not approximately, but with perfect and absolute precision, the cause of death.

But why stop to mention single instances when the records of jurisprudence everywhere are full of cases where science has been applied to legal affairs? The judicial investigation of such crimes as poisoning, wounds, infanticide, abortion, rape, illegitimacy, to say nothing of the deeds caused by insanity, must ever receive a large amount of aid at the hands of medical science.

In these Science does not always appear as an avenging Nemesis, hunting down and punishing the guilty. She sometimes plays the rôle of the vindicator of the innocent. Dr. Lyons gives an account of a case in which a man was arrested and charged with murder. A hatchet, smeared with dried blood and hair, was found under his bed. Indignation ran high, and people were almost disposed to lynch him. He was, however, detained, and the blood-stains and hair subjected to microscopical examination, when they were found to be those of an animal which he had killed and had then carelessly thrown the hatchet under the bed.

Such are some of the practical benefits accruing to us from scientific research. With Briarean arms it has reached out and laid hold of every part of our civilization. Proteus-like it