uling--which
has been reaffirmed at Annapolis--the settled principles of science
were overborne by ignorant conjecture, and to the mockery of justice,
to the deep disgrace of our commonwealth, Dr. Schoeppe was condemned
to death upon evidence which, from the same bench, was subsequently
stigmatized as being insufficient to warrant his commitment for trial.

Three years of close confinement under the shadow of death followed.
The governor refused a pardon, and Dr. Schoeppe heard the hammer
driving the nails into his scaffold beneath the prison-window. He was
measured for his coffin, but at the last moment was reprieved, and
listened to the heavy thud as the drop fell and a man whose companion
he was to have been on the scaffold was launched into eternity.
Finally, moved by the incessant pleadings of Mr. Hepburn, the junior
counsel, by the urgings of the public press, led by the Philadelphia
_Evening Bulletin_, and by the protests of numerous scientific bodies,
the legislature passed a special act granting Dr. Schoeppe a new
trial. On this occasion the judge allowed the weakness of the expert
testimony for the prosecution to be demonstrated, and chiefly as a
result of this demonstration--of what has been called the "coarse
brutality" of showing Dr. Conrad's ignorance--Dr. Schoeppe was
acquitted.

If the principles contended for in this article had been acknowledged,
the processes and results in the case of Dr. Schoeppe would have been
far different. In the first place, the post mortem would have been
entrusted to some one qualified to make it--an expert in legal
medicine--and very probably a natural cause for the death of Miss
Stennecke would have been found. Such post mortem not having been
made, the case, after Professor Aiken's analysis, would have been
dropped, because it was impossible that prussic acid could have caused
the death. Had, however, capable experts failed to detect a natural
cause of death, a very serious case might have been made out against
Dr. Schoeppe, even though the analyst had not found morphia in the
stomach. The prosecution might have affirmed that the poison had been
absorbed, and therefore was not in the stomach, and, for the support
of the charge, relied upon the resemblance of the symptoms to those
produced by morphia, and upon the absence of natural cause of death.

A case which has acquired even more celebrity than the last is that of
Mrs. Wharton of Baltimore. The chief facts, as devel