Book Reviews

Jurisprudence, as even that of Henke, have been written by men who not only wanted direct experience in medico-legal investigations, but wanted even actual experience in medical practice, and to whom therefore the appearance of wounds and diseases were known far more by description than observation ; wThile, above all, the habits of the rank of life in which the immense majority of medico-legal cases occui's were familiar to them merely as matters of hearsay, or as something apart from an experience which, if it extended at all beyond the bounds of the library, certainly did not reach beyond the dissecting-room or the laboratory; we shall be able to estimate the value of a treatise, whose author has for upwards of thirty years actually observed nearly every medico-legal case which has occurred in such a city as Berlin, and who besides, from his official position, has necessarily become acquainted, for about the same period, with the particulars of almost every investigation of importance instituted throughout Prussia, and this with the additional advantage of having been long occupied in an extensive medical practice. In virtue of Dr Casper's position as Pro-