when it was submitted to their inspection." The Solicitor-General had thus closed _his_ remarks on the subject of the above excerpt charter: "These considerations make the absence of all explanation as to the history of this document a most suspicious circumstance in the prisoner's case; so much so, with submission, that the possession of the deed must be accounted for by the prisoner in some way or other, before he can shake himself free from the charge that is now made against him." The following is the substance of the answer to this portion of the case, offered by his eloquent and ingenious advocate. Unable to struggle against the bulk of the professional evidence tending to impeach the genuineness of the excerpt, and to disprove the existence of the alleged charter from which it was taken, Mr Robertson admitted that there were the great distinctions which had been alleged, between a completed charter and the instrument which preceded it; that the words "_per signetum_" could not properly appear on a completed charter; that the document under consideration purported to be an excerpt of such completed charter; that the abbreviations "_Reg. Mag. Sig. Lib. LVII._" could not appear on an excerpt of the date assigned by the prisoner to that which he had brought forward before the Scottish courts; that it was proved that no such charter as that of the 9th Dec. 1639 was entered on record; and that Archbishop Spottiswoode could not have attested such an instrument, having undoubtedly ceased to be chancellor, and died previously to its date. BUT he said that there was a vast difference between a genuine, though erroneous copy, and a forged principal; and also between a forgery (if such it were) so palpable as to challenge everybody's notice, and one so skilfully executed as to have been capable of deceiving all the Scottish law functionaries, and the prisoner's own law advisers, and himself, for a period of ten years, during which it had been courting examination, without forgery having been suggested till that prosecution. But _was_ the excerpt proved to be a forgery? The statement in the Lord Ordinary's judgment, relating to Hovenden's affidavit, showed that there was evidence--or something like it--in that proceeding, to establish the existence of the excerpt in 1723. The document was not a _copy_ of the alleged charter, but only an excerpt or _extract_; and so might be explained the absence of some matters which would be in the original. And as to the admitted _errors_, the excerpt was made in Ireland, not in Scotland; was "an old _Irish_ bungled copy"--a "blundered _Irish_ extract"--"an _Irish_ excerpt of a copy of a deed"--"an _Irish_ copy." The marking "_Reg. Mag. Sig. Lib. LVII._" in the margin may have been an _ex post facto_ addition by some third person, who may be the person who had invented the story of Cromwell carrying off the records of Scotland. "_Consanguineus_ noster," and