, such as the Court of Chancery, the Courts of
Admiralty Jurisdiction, (except in prize causes under the act of
Parliament,) and in the Ecclesiastical Courts, wherein the trial is not
by an inclosed jury in those courts, such strait limits are not of
course necessary: the cause is continued by many adjournments; as long
as the trial lasts, new witnesses are examined (even after the regular
stage) for each party, on a special application under the circumstances
to the sound discretion of the court, where the evidence offered is
newly come to the knowledge or power of the party, and appears on the
face of it to be material in the cause. _Even after hearing_, new
witnesses have been examined, or former witnesses reexamined, not as the
right of the parties, but _ad informandam conscientiam judicis_.[71] All
these things are not unfrequent in some, if not in all of these courts,
and perfectly known to the judges of Westminster Hall; who cannot be
supposed ignorant of the practice of the Court of Chancery, and who sit
to try appeals from the Admiralty and Ecclesiastical Courts as
delegates.

But as criminal prosecutions according to the forms of the Civil and
Canon Law are neither many nor important in any court of this part of
the kingdom, your Committee thinks it right to state the undisputed
principle of the Imperial Law, from the great writer on this subject
before cited by us,--from Carpzovius. He says, "that a doubt has arisen,
whether, evidence being once given in a trial on a public prosecution,
(_in processu inquisitorio_,) and the witnesses being examined, it may
be allowed to form other and new articles and to produce new witnesses."
Your Committee must here observe, that the _processus inquisitorius_ is
that proceeding in which the prosecution is carried on in the name of
the judge acting _ex officio_, from that duty of his office which is
called the _nobile officium judicis_. For the judge under the Imperial
Law possesses both those powers, the inquisitorial and the judicial,
which in the High Court of Parliament are more aptly divided and
exercised by the different Houses; and in this kind of process the House
will see that Carpzovius couples the production of new witnesses and the
forming of new articles (the undoubted privilege of the Commons) as
intimately and necessarily connected. He then proceeds to solve the
doubt. "Certainly," says he, "there are authors who deny, that, after
publication of the depositio