the cover," said Lord Meadowbank, "may be genuine, while the documents said to be contained in it may be forged; original enclosures may have been withdrawn, and others substituted."--"If you have arrived at the conclusion that the documents at the back of the old map are forgeries, (and how you are to do otherwise it is difficult for me to imagine,) I think you will not find it very easy to disconnect _this reference to the inscription_, and to the alleged genealogy of the persons with whom it was the object of the prisoner to connect himself, from these documents, or to entertain any reasonable doubt that both are in _pari casu_--were fabricated with the view of bolstering up one another, and must be alike liable to the imputation of forgery: both sets of documents were exactly calculated for making up those defects in the chain of evidence pointed out by the Lord Ordinary. I shall conclude what I have to say upon this matter with an observation which will have occurred to yourselves--that if you hold _the excerpt charter_ a forgery, and that the documents written and pasted upon the back of the map are forgeries, it will be difficult for you not to hold that this must affect in a most material degree the evidence relating to the _other_ documents, which the public prosecutor avers to be also forgeries. In other words, if you are satisfied that the proof is clear that _any_ of these sets of documents are forged, but that the evidence with respect to others is not so conclusive, you will have to make up your minds whether, considering that the whole are so connected with and bear upon each other, there can be any good reason for fixing a character upon the one which must not also belong to the other." [53] Swinton, p. 324. We have been thus particular in laying before the reader the just and able observations of Lord Meadowbank on this last portion of the case, chiefly because of the result at which the jury arrived. It seems to us not a little singular that one material enclosure in the De Porquet packet escaped the notice of both the counsel for the Crown and the prisoner, and also the judge: we allude to the Genealogical Tree, professed to be certified by "Thos. Campbell, 15th April 1759," and forming one of the charges in the indictment. If this be really a forgery, it seems one of extraordinary impudence.