We know not when we have found greater difficulty in speaking on any subject than on the present. The weight of arguments seem often to bear hard on those who are the objects of the greatest compassion; on unhappy women, deluded to their ruin, struggling with remorse, with the apprehension of dis-grace, acting from a momentary phrenzy in self defence, often inconsistently and improperly subjected to suspicion from circumstances wholly beyond their power, and to conviction from the fortuitious occurrence of events not within their calculation. On this subject particularly, and indeed in every branch of medical jurisprudence, we strongly advise the practitioner to be cautious. He may reason as a physiologist, but he should act as a man of feeling and reflection, who knows that no medical conclusion is certain, and that the life of a perhaps innocent individual may be sacrificed to his hasty oracular decision, perhaps to his inadvertency. The punishment of a crime, says Bec-caria, cannot be strictly called just or necessary, while the law has not employed the best possible means of preventing it. The law is indeed silent; but modern refinement, the precision of outrageous virtue, which admits not of the penitence of a sinner, urges the unhappy culprit to the worst of crimes.

In such circumstances the woman, from the causes already stated, is alone, her mind agitated, her resolution weak, herself spiritless and indecisive. The labour is perhaps rapid, the child born during fainting or convulsions, and lost from want of that attention which no law enforces, and which the apprehension of disgrace prevents her calling for. A state of this kind may be ascertained by subsequent faintings, peculiar debility, a low fluttering pulse, paleness, and subsequent oedema. Should these symptoms not occur, let us not yet decide without hesitation; for other circumstances should be also considered.

The first question must be, was the life of the child so perfectly established as to be probably continued after its birth ? This is answered by its appearance, and the perfect, the complete development of its organs. It may be again asked, was it not dead before delivery ? According to Alberti, if dead previous to delivery, the limbs are flexible, the skin wrinkled or soft, the colour yellow or livid, the abdomen sunk, with"marks of commencing putrefaction, particularly about the navel, and the umbilical cord empty, yellow, livid, and apparently dissolved. The appearance of the cord is, however, equivocal; for the access of the air will, in a short time, produce the same changes. Indeed, all these appearances are the result of putrefaction, and the child may have died only a very short time previous to its birth; nor are authorities wanting to show that, while the access of the external air is prevented, putrefaction does not soon take place. (Heister, Alberti, and Hebenstreit.) The marks of apparent violence on the body are by no means decisive; but we have already, when speaking of contusions, laid down the best diagnostics on this point.

If an infant has breathed, it is supposed to have lived; but how many weakly infants are corn alive, without breathing for many minutes; and how often, on the other hand, after a hard labour, does the child breathe once or twice, and then die ? That the child may breathe before the delivery is complete, and die before it is fully born, is a fancy within the verge of possibility only, but too improbable to induce us to enlarge on it. A child, indeed, wholly perfect, may be strangled in its birth by the twisting of the umbilical cord round its neck; and it has been doubted whether, in this case, it is suffocated or dies apoplectic. It is probable that death is rather the consequence of the stoppage of the circulation through the cord itself; but this is of, little moment as the mark remains. May not this mark, however, be the effect of violence? It certainly may be-so; and the famous experiment of the lungs sinking in water is adduced to determine the doubt.

In a child that has not breathed, the lungs occupy the upper part of the chest, so as to leave the heart and pericardium exposed to view. But when the lungs are distended by respiration they fill the chest, and become specifically lighter than water. The English courts do not admit this experiment as evidence, and we arc-unwilling to disturb their decisions. We shall, therefore, add a few words on it as philosophers rather than as forensic physicians.

Heister observes, that the experiment is indecisive, because scirrhi in the lungs will make them specifically heavier than water; but who would be so weak as not to examine whether the experiment was tried on a morbid or a sound part; for the morbid lungs even of an adult will sink in water? He adds, that he has seen a child who had breathed twenty hours, whose lungs sunk in water; but he here speaks of the whole viscus, not of any particular portion, on which the experiment ought to be made. Again, it is contended that when putrefaction has taken place, the lungs of a child who has never breathed will swim. This fact is positively denied by at least equal authority; and, in reality, the lungs are scarcely susceptible of putrefaction, even when it has taken place in a considerable degree in the other parts of the body. If there were, however, any ambiguity, it may be at once removed by a slight attention. The air, separated by putrefaction, may be observed in the water passing along the divisions of the lobules, while air within them is invisible.

It is certainly possible that the mother, in attempting to revive a still born child, may endeavour to inflate the lungs by her own breath. Anatomists of eminence have differed on the possibility of success; and we own that it appears to us impracticable, since the force of the expiration must be sufficiently great to expand the thorax, and the nostrils must be at the same time closed. Humanity will, however, take this source of expanded lungs into consideration when the life of an individual is at stake.