The prisoner's counsel said, in defence to this serious section of the charge--the map is not pretended to have been forged; nor is the date "1703" false. Who Ph. Mallet, or Caron St. Estienne, was, "at the distance of one hundred and thirty years, no one could tell." Flechier was alive in 1707, and therefore _might_ have written the note attributed to him in that year, and so with Fenelon. "Now, gentlemen," said Mr Robertson, "what is the case of the Crown on the map? I think it rests entirely on the appointment of De l'Isle as _premier géographe du Roi_," which was unquestionably the true--the inevitable--issue on which to put the case; and he proceeded to contend, on grounds which we have already indicated in passing, that the Crown had not established the act of forgery, by clear, irrefragable, irresistible proof. What, then, says the considerate reader, we ask, as we did in the former instance--were these writings on the map of Canada--any or all of them--genuine or spurious? III. THE DE PORQUET PACKET. With every disposition to treat this item of evidence with the gravity and impartiality befitting quasi-judicial investigation, we acknowledge feeling extreme difficulty in doing so. To us, as English lawyers, intense would seem the simplicity of those expecting any rational being to give credit for an instant to the contents of this astonishing packet, as genuine. Two months after the judgment of the Lord Ordinary, pointing out the fatal flaw in the prisoner's pedigree--(viz., the non-proof of two particular steps in that pedigree--that John No. 3 descended from John No. 2, and the latter from John No. 1,) a sensitive and conscientious thief died--viz. in March 1837--in the exact nick of time, having kept by him till that sad event a packet which he had purloined from his employer in 1798[44] i. e. _for forty years_; and which packet contained four family documents, of vital moment, applying themselves with miraculous exactness to the deficiency in the pedigree aforesaid! We are here stating shortly, but correctly, the effect of a document under this head of the charge, set forth in the indictment. That document we gave _verbatim_ in our last Number.[45] Messrs De Porquet, London booksellers, received a packet by the penny post, on opening which they found one addressed to Lord Stirling, accompanied by a note from a "_Mrs. Innes Smyth_," (of whom no one has hitherto seen, heard, or known anything whatever,) requesting them to send it to his lordship; whose son happening in the month of April 1837--_i. e._, a few weeks after the opportune death of the mysterious thief--to call at Messrs De Porquet, they gave him the packet addressed to his father. Instead of at once forwarding it to him, the young gentleman instantly took it to his solicitors; and after an exciting colloquy as to what this packet might contain, (the idea never occurring to him, that it would be the proper formal course to send it off to his parent according