It is fair, and even necessary, to assume as a fact, which, indeed, we have seen established by the practice of "Merry-Andrew" and the "Spune," that the disinterring craft were in the habit of purchasing dead bodies from poor lodging-keepers or relatives, in all which cases the bodies would be very different in appearance from those procured in the ordinary way. We suspect, from the nature of the Scotch character, with its sympathies and friendships, that those examples were not at any time many; and the best evidence of this is, that under such an easy system, the resurrection trade, always difficult and precarious, would not, especially after the indictment of Dr Pattison of Glasgow in 1814, have been so assiduously prosecuted. Such a system, too, depending upon the character of a people and the feelings of individuals, must be supposed to have been under the regulation of those natural, or, if you like, unnatural, laws to which all organic beings are subjected. If, during a period of a decade, examples of such purchase and sale were only one or two in a year, even increasing _paulatim et gradatim_ to three or four, we would not be prepared for a sudden increase starting up all at once in one year to from sixteen to twenty; and there were many people who calculated the number in our "Court of Cacus" at thirty. We may insist here a little upon this view, because, amidst all the outcry against Knox and his assistants, it was never taken into account. Nor could this sudden rise have appeared the less startling to any mind below that of an idiot, that this new trade was not spread over a great number of persons--and nothing less than a _very_ great number could have sufficed for watching, ferreting, persuading, bribing--overcoming all the prejudices arrayed against an act of sale--but was altogether engrossed by two poor squalid Irishmen, who had come into the trade by a leap, and all but superseded the old experienced hands. If we were to make the supposition, that now, or at any other period in the history of Scotland, two Irishmen had taken it into their heads to set up a trade of this kind in the city of Edinburgh, we would soon come to an estimate of their success, if the doubt would not rather be, that if they got one body in the course of a whole year, it would be no less a wonder than a shame. Nor was there any reasons which might have led the recipients in the Square to suspect that these two solitary individuals were merely the agents or hands of a "dead-body company," or a joint-stock affair, with one of the crack names, "Association for the purpose of purchasing dead bodies, for the benefit of science and the human race," a supposition which alone could have reconciled men with eyes in their heads, and brains in those heads, to the anomaly before them.