[A] By sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch.
Indirect or mediate evidence is inferred from a relatively minor fact or relatively minor facts already directly proved.
This inference is drawn by a valid process of reasoning from a relatively minor fact or minor facts already directly deposed to by a witness, who may be a party interested in the case or cause, or a stranger-witness, either friendly or hostile.
Hence, Circumstantial Evidence is specially inferential and cumulative in its nature. It denotes the resultant of a method of knowledge, which has carried the Inquirer forward by successive stages of advancement.
It implies the inferring of the unknown from the known; but from a known which has been itself transmuted from the unknown, at some point of time anterior to the making of the successive stage of advancement in the knowledge of the facts sought to be proved, and vindicated by some rule of Law.
The following interesting account of Evidence generally is from the pen of Mr. Frank Pick, of Burton Lodge, York, a student of the Law: —
Evidence is the collective term used to denote the facts whereby some proposition, statement, or conclusion is sought to be established or confirmed.
While, as thus defined, the term Evidence primarily denotes the actual known facts themselves which form the basis or point of departure, it connotes also a method or process in the development of those known facts to a resultant fact or opinion: and the resultant fact or opinion so obtained. The former is often styled Testimony.
This will be illustrated in Circumstantial Evidence, and in what is commonly styled “Expert Evidence,” though better, “Evidence of Opinion,” where a person from a consideration of certain facts not necessarily expressed (being likewise one specially competent to form an opinion where such certain facts are involved) gives an opinion which may be used as, and for similar purposes with, evidence as above defined.