Under the head of Misreception of Evidence may be classed the observations of the judge, where, apparently in order to prevent the jury from being influenced _in favor of the prisoner_, owing to the small quantity of arsenic found in the body of the deceased, he mentioned _an instance of a dog_ being poisoned, in the body of which, though it had taken a large number of grains of arsenic, no arsenic was found after its death. The judge, in other words, turned himself into a witness for the prosecution. The unfairness to the prisoner of such a course is obvious. Had the judge been an ordinary witness he might have been cross-examined to show, _e.g._, that arsenic _passes away from the body of a dog much more quickly than from that of a man_, or that the circumstances as to time and quantity taken were such as to prove that there was no analogy between the two cases. As the matter stands, the judge’s recollection of an experiment _on a dog_, which had been made many years before, was meant to rebut a proposition much relied on by the defense, viz., that the small quantity of arsenic found in the body of the deceased was consistent with the view that he was _in the habit of taking arsenic_, rather than with the case for the Crown that he had been intentionally poisoned. CRUEL MISSTATEMENT BY THE CORONER The inquest was formally opened by taking the evidence of the identification of the deceased by his brother, Michael Maybrick, and then adjourned for a fortnight, the coroner announcing that there had been a post-mortem examination by Dr. Humphreys, and that the result of that examination was that poison was found in the stomach of the deceased in such quantities as to justify further examination; that the stomach of the deceased, and its contents, would meanwhile be chemically analyzed, and on the result of that analysis would depend the question whether or not criminal proceedings against some person would follow. Now the announcement that “poison had been found in the stomach of the deceased” was _contrary to fact_, and in consequence of this _cruel misstatement_ the proceedings caused an immense amount of popular excitement and prejudice against the accused, who, being too ill to be removed, remained at Battlecrease House, in charge of the police, till the following Saturday morning, the 18th May, when a sort of court inquiry was opened in Mrs. Maybrick’s bedroom by Colonel Bidwell, one of the county magistrates. MEDICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE PROSECUTION The evidence of Dr. Arthur Richard Hopper, who had been Mr. and Mrs. Maybrick’s medical adviser for about seven years, was taken. He had not attended Mr. Maybrick during his last illness, but spoke about Mrs. Maybrick having asked him the year before to check her husband from taking _dangerous drugs_, and that Mr. Maybrick had admitted to him that he used to dose himself with anything his friends recommended, and _that he was used to the taking of arsenic_.