The coroner is at best no more than an appendix to the legal anatomy, and frequently he is a disease. The spectacle of a medical man of small learning and less English trying to preside over a court of first instance is enough to make the accused himself chuckle for joy. Not long ago the coroners of New York discovered that, owing to the fact that the district attorney or his representatives generally arrived first at the scene of any crime, there was nothing left for the “medicos” to do, for the district attorney would thereupon submit the matter at once to the grand jury instead of going through the formality of a hearing in the coroner’s court. The legal medicine men felt aggrieved, and determined to be such early birds that no worm should them escape. Accordingly, the next time one of them was notified of a homicide he raced his horse down Madison Avenue at such speed that he collided with a trolley car and broke his leg. Another complained to the district attorney that the assistants of the latter, who had arrived at the scene of an asphyxiation before him, had bungled everything. “Ach, dose young men!” he exclaimed, wringing his hands—“Dose young men, dey come here und dey opened der vindow und let out der gas und _all mine evidence esgaped_.” The same coroner on another occasion discovered that a murderer had removed the body of his victim to New Jersey, thus depriving him of any corpse upon which to hold his inquest. A sympathetic reporter thereupon suggested that it would be well to have a law prohibiting any such removal by the party committing a homicide. “Dot vas a good idea!” solemnly replied the medical Solon. “It should be made a crime! I will haf it proposed at der next legislature.” It is said that this interesting personage once instructed his jury to find that “the _diseased_ came to his death from an _ulster_ on the stomach.” These anecdotes are, perhaps, what judges would call _obiter dicta_, yet the coroner’s court has more than once been utilized as a field in the actual preparation of a criminal case. When Roland B. Molineux was first suspected of having caused the death of Mrs. Adams by sending the famous poisoned package of patent-medicine to Harry Cornish through the mails, the assistant district attorney summoned him as a witness to the coroner’s court and attempted to get from him in this way a statement which Molineux would otherwise have refused to make.