These charges are very practical, and even to us, at this distant period, who would be regulated by reason and truth, and cannot be under the influence of passion, are hard bones. Independently of our estimate of youths--putting Knox out of the question,--of good birth and parentage, whose generous hearts would revolt from the thought of a guilty cognisance,--some of these assistants who came in contact with Burke, "and no questions asked," have risen to rank in their profession, and bear a high character for honesty and humanity. "They ken their ain ken;" but their negative defence leaves their friends to the slough of mere metaphysics. We all know that mysterious attractiveness and repulsiveness of the mind which makes such fools of even the most practical of mankind. The man would not look through Galileo's telescope, because he knew beforehand that there was nothing to be seen; but he did no more than every man does every day he lives. We all know that we may look, and not see, hear, and not understand; yea, though the image of the outer thing may be in black and white on the back of the eye, and the words play their intellectual tune on the drum of the ear, you may neither see the one nor hear the other. The bird-lime of acceptance is not present, and there is even more--an absolute recusancy in proportion to some reigning wish in the form of what we call a prejudice. All this is alphabetic, and we might go deeper and get lost, but there is no occasion. The truth is, that these medical students had a strong wish for subjects. This rose out of another wish, that for knowledge, and this again came out of one behind, a wish to shine or make money,--the benefit to mankind being only that thing which we all understand when we hear people getting philanthropical in recommending their leather, as contributing to the good of the eternal sons of God. Then the next truth is, that they _did_ suspect, and becoming the paradoxes which so many unconsciously become, did not _know_, in the sense of an apprehension, that they suspected. When the thought sought entrance to the mind, always under the cogency of the repulse of unwillingness, it was either thrown out or dissolved; to all which the authority of their leader or lecturer contributed, and not less the generosity of their own hearts, naturally seeking uniformity, and averse to think so ill of human nature, as was required to be implied in an atrocity never before heard of in the world. If the thought had ever come so strong upon them as to have amounted to an active conviction, why, then they must have glided into the crime of winking toleration, and to that, we verily believe, they never came. There were only three of these young men who took an active charge. If there had been a score, we might have conceded that one, perhaps two, might have been found among them capable, by the predisposition of an evil nature, to have quietly succumbed to the