cord fixed to the neck, and fastened to the hospital bed. A patient in La Charité was found one morning hanging by the rope which was attached to the head of his bed. He had fastened this by a loop round his neck, but his body was so retained, that when discovered he was on his knees by the side of his bed. In 1832, at the west end of the town, a man was found hanging in his room, with his knees bent forwards and his feet resting upon the floor. He had evidently been dead for some time, since cadaverous rigidity had already commenced. The manner in which this man had committed suicide was as follows:—He had made a slip knot with one end of his apron, (he was a working mechanic,) and having placed his neck in this, he threw the other end of the apron over the top of the door, and shutting the door behind him, he had succeeded in wedging it in firmly. At the same moment he had probably raised himself on tip-toe, and then allowed himself to fall; in this way he died. The weight of his body had apparently sufficed to drag down a part of the apron, for it seemed as if it had been very much stretched. In October, 1833, a gentleman who was employed as an assistant in a respectable school in the neighbourhood of London, was discovered by some of his pupils, one morning, in a sitting posture, on a dark part of a staircase of the house. Upon examining further, it was ascertained that he was completely dead, and that he was suspended to the banisters by a cravat firmly tied round his neck. The deceased had evidently made two similar attempts at self-destruction before he succeeded, as part of a silk pocket-handkerchief and his braces were found suspended to other parts of the banisters. It seemed scarcely possible to those who discovered him that the deceased could really have accomplished suicide by hanging in such a situation, for his body was resting entirely on the stairs, and, making every allowance for the slipping of the ligature by which he was suspended, still his feet must have been throughout in contact with the stair. There have been few medico-legal investigations of late years which have excited greater interest than the case of the Duke de Bourbon, in France. On the 27th August, 1830, the duke was found suspended in his bed-room, in the chateau* of St. Leu. An inquest was held the same morning on the body, and from the evidence of the witnesses, as well as from the reports of the physicians and surgeons who examined it, a verdict was returned to the effect that the duke had committed suicide in a fit of temporary insanity. This event did not excite much notice until the contents of his will were made public.