in every civilized community the retention by a judge of presents from suitors visits him not only with disqualification but disgrace. Hence it is that, apart from the partisan character of their opinions, their utterances, now that they have as a class become the retained agents of the parties, have lost all judicial authority and are entitled only to the weight which sound and consistent criticism will award to the testimony itself. In making this criticism a large allowance must be made for the bias necessarily belonging to men retained to advocate a cause, who speak not as to fact but as to opinion, and who are selected, on all moot questions, either from their prior advocacy of them or from their readiness to adopt the opinion to be proved. In this sense we may adopt the strong language of Lord Kenyon, that skilled witnesses come with such a bias on their minds to support the cause in which they are embarked, that hardly any weight should be given to their evidence.” This author then proceeds to show that under the civil law system the conclusions of experts were formerly treated as unassailable facts, but under the English and American common law system this is not the case, but their testimony is to be weighed by the court. He says: “The grounds on which the conclusion is reached may be asked for: the expert’s capacity for drawing conclusions, as well as his premises, may be assailed. Cases of conflict are to be determined, not by the number of witnesses, but by the weight of their testimony, and though the opinion of an expert of high character may be entitled to great respect, yet if questioned, its authority must ultimately rest upon the truth, material and formal, of the reasoning on which it depends.” Judge Davis, of the Supreme Court of Maine, in Neil’s case (cited in Wharton and Stille’s “Medical Jurisprudence,” Vol. I., Section 294), said: “If there is any kind of testimony that is not only of no value, but even worse than that, it is in my judgment that of medical experts. They may be able to state the diagnosis of a disease more learnedly, but upon the question whether it had at a given time reached a stage that the subject of it was incapable of making a contract, or irresponsible for his acts, the opinions of his neighbors, of men of good common sense, would be worth more than that of all the experts in the country.”