_In Matters of Common Experience Witnesses in General Often State Conclusions._—Moreover, in matters of common experience, the testimony of any witness, if carefully analyzed, often shows that he is sometimes allowed to draw, and state, his conclusions and inferences, instead of being required to confine his evidence simply to telling in the strictest possible way, and with the closest limitations, what he actually witnessed. A good illustration of this is the case of a person who sees a crime of homicide committed by shooting, and is called upon to testify in court. He would be allowed to testify that the defendant, if he could identify the prisoner at the bar as such, was the person whom he saw fire the shot, although he might not have examined him with close scrutiny, and might never have seen him before the crime. In saying that the defendant was the person who fired the shot, while he would be in terms testifying to a fact, he would still be drawing an inference, and giving an opinion, based upon his recollection of the person whom he saw engaged in the act of firing, and of the likeness or resemblance of such person to the prisoner at the bar, which would be a matter of comparison and of opinion. So, too, although he could not see the bullet take its course from the mouth of the gun and imbed itself in the body of the deceased, yet if he saw the firing, heard the explosion, saw the flash and smoke of the powder, observed the direction in which the accused pointed the weapon, and saw the deceased stagger and fall, he would be allowed to testify in answer to a direct question whether or not the accused shot the deceased. And, yet in making up that answer he would be testifying not simply to a matter of actual observation, but to a conclusion. As it is in reference to the question of identity so it is as to many other matters which come before our courts, in all of which the witnesses are permitted, without objection, to testify to conclusions and to give answers which are the result of inferences which they draw themselves, rather than a statement of their actual observations. The law is not a metaphysical but a practical science, limited and confined by the practical restrictions which experience has shown must be put upon it, in order to enable it to accomplish its object of administering justice between man and man. Men form such conclusions as have been indicated, instinctively and unconsciously, and it would be practicably impossible for them to narrate any occurrence without embodying in their narration some of these natural and unconscious conclusions. The law, therefore, includes among the matters which witnesses are permitted to characterize as facts, those daily and hourly inferences and deductions which all men are accustomed to make, and concerning which no two men who are properly constituted can greatly differ. It is true that this practice sometimes leads to error, but it has grown out of necessity.