SCIENCE AND
THE CRIMINAL
BY
C. AINSWORTH MITCHELL
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1911
To
Mark Hanbury Beaufoy, Esq., J.P.
as
A Mark of Regard and Esteem
PREFACE
In the following pages I have endeavoured to give some account of the ways in which scientific discovery has been utilised in the struggle between society and the criminal.
I have tried to describe the principles upon which different kinds of scientific evidence are based, and at the same time to bring human interest into what would otherwise tend to be dry detail by giving an outline of trials in which such evidence has been given. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to mention that in many of these illustrative trials the accused persons were proved innocent of the charges brought against them, and that although their cases were tried in the criminal courts the title of the book in no way applies to them.
For the accounts of the older trials I have drawn freely upon Cobbett’s State Trials, Paris and Fonblanque’s Medical Jurisprudence, and the first edition of Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence, while I must also acknowledge my indebtedness to the Circumstantial Evidence of Mr. Justice Wills and the recent excellent lectures on Forensic Chemistry, by Mr. Jago.