"'Gentlemen,' he said, 'you have often been assembled in crowds upon some public or festive occasion. Your hats have been thrown pell-mell in a mass with perhaps a hundred other hats, all having a general resemblance. Suppose you had attempted to describe your hat to a friend or servant, so that he might go and pick it out for you. It has as many points, for description as a written signature--its color, height of crown, width of band, lining, &c. Do you think that a friend or servant could, by any possibility, have picked out your hat for you? And yet when you went yourself, the moment your eye would light upon it, you instantly recognize it among a hundred or five hundred hats. Familiarity with it has stamped its picture on your mind, and the moment you see it, the hat fills and fits the picture in your mind, as perfectly as the same hat fits your head.' "The jury were evidently won, and gave full credence to the ridiculed witnesses. "The other instance during the same term (cited by Judge Thompson,) occurred in the celebrated prosecution of Naaman Roberts for forgery--in forging the name of Col. Adam Dickinson to a bond for $600.00. "The body of the bond was confessedly the handwriting of the prisoner at the bar. That was admitted. The signature was a tolerably successful attempt at imitating the peculiar handwriting of Adam Dickinson. But no expert could look at the whole paper and fail to see a general resemblance between the body of the instrument and the signature, raising a strong conviction in the mind that both proceeded from the same hand. "The defense strongly insisted upon excluding the body of the instrument from the view of the witness, by covering it with paper or turning it down, and so confining the view to the signature only--upon the familiar doctrine of the law of evidence forbidding a comparison of various handwritings of the party as a ground for an opinion upon the identity, or genuineness of the disputed writing. And this point was ably and elaborately argued by the prisoner's counsel. "The learned prosecutor met it thus: