As the ancients exposed their sick on the high roads, for the advantage of receiving from the casual passenger his opinion and experience respecting the particular malady under which they laboured, so did they expose the bodies of persons, supposed to have been murdered, in order that each spectator might candidly observe their appearance, and freely inquire into the circumstances which attended their decease; thus, as we are informed by _Pliny_, was the body of _Genucius_, a tribune of the Roman people, on his being found dead in bed, brought forth to the assembled multitude, who, unable to discover any external marks of violence, pronounced his death to have been a visitation of the gods; and we learn from _Tacitus_, that the remains of _Germanicus_, who was poisoned by _Piso_, were exposed in the market place of Antioch; thus too, in conformity with ancient custom, was the bleeding corpse of _Julius Cæsar_ exposed to public gaze and animadversion. The decisions, however, which such a custom was intended to facilitate, were generally perverted by the delusions of credulity and superstition. Among the more prominent instances of the latter source of fallacy, we may notice a belief that has extended even into later days—that upon the presence of the murderer the wounds of his victim will bleed afresh! “O gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry’s wounds Open their congeal’d mouths, and bleed afresh! Blush, blush, thou lump of foul deformity; For ’tis thy presence that exhales this blood From cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells; Thy deed, inhuman and unnatural, Provokes this deluge most unnatural.”— _Richard_ III. _act_ 1. _s._ 2.