The third part of the Fröbelian rule, “To presuppose as little as possible,” must be rigidly adhered to. I do not say this pessimistically, but simply because we lawyers, through endless practice, arrange the issue so much more easily, conceive its history better and know what to exclude and what, with some degree of certainty, to retain. In consequence we often forget our powers and present the unskilled laity, even when persons of education, too much of the material. Then it must be considered that most witnesses are uneducated, that we can not actually descend to their level, and their unhappiness under a flood of strange material we can grasp only with difficulty. Because we do not know the witness’s point of view we ask too much of him, and therefore fail in our purpose. And if, in some exceptional case, an educated man is on the stand, we fail again, since, having the habit of dealing with the uneducated, we suppose this man to know our own specialties because he has a little education. Experience does not dispel this illusion. Whether actual training in another direction dulls the natural and free outlook we desire in the witness, or whether, in our profession, education presupposes tendencies too ideal, whatever be the reasons, it is a fact that our hardest work is generally with the most highly educated witnesses. I once had to write a protocol based on the testimony of a famous scholar who was witness in a small affair. It was a slow job. Either he did not like the terms as I dictated them, or he was doubtful of the complete certainty of this or that assertion. Let alone that I wasted an hour or two, that protocol, though rewritten, was full of corrections and erasures. And the thing turned out to be nonsense at the end. The beginning contradicted the conclusion; it was unintelligible, and still worse, untrue. As became manifest later, through the indubitable testimony of many witnesses, the scholar had been so conscientious, careful and accurate that he simply did not know what he had seen. His testimony was worthless. I have had such experiences repeatedly and others have confessed them. To the question: Where not presuppose too much? the answer is: everywhere. First of all, little must be presupposed concerning people’s powers of observation. They claim to have heard, seen or felt so and so, and they have not seen, heard, or felt it at all, or quite differently. They assent vigorously that they have grasped, touched, counted or examined something, and on closer examination it is demonstrated that it was only a passing glance they threw on it. And it is still worse where something more than ordinary perception is being considered, when exceptionally keen senses or information are necessary. People trust the conventional and when close observation is required often lack the knowledge proper to their particular status. In this way, by presupposing especial professional knowledge in a given witness, great mistakes are made.