It has been suggested that it would be a dreadful thing if the police had prompted Harding in this matter. It certainly would have been a dreadful thing if they had prompted him or anybody else to manufacture a confession, and nobody suggests for a moment that they would do, or did do, such a thing. But believing Ross guilty, as they no doubt did believe him guilty, and yet not having sufficient evidence to prove it, they would have been merely following a commonplace practice if they had employed Harding to endeavour to get a confession of his guilt. In one of the daily papers, Mr. Brennan was represented as having said in argument before the Appeal Court that it would have been a very dreadful thing for the police so to employ Harding. In fact, he said the exact opposite. But Harding was a very dangerous agent to employ on this task. Some at least of the Detective Force knew that he had volunteered for this kind of duty on a former occasion, and that his services had been declined. There would have been nothing wrong from the point of view of anyone engaged in unravelling a mysterious crime for a detective to have said: “We know this, and that, and the other; see if you can get from him information on the points we know nothing about.” And whether that is, or is not, what they did, the simple fact remains that if they had done so, they would have told him the things in which the Harding and Matthews “confessions” agree, and would have assigned to him the duty of filling in the gaps which are filled in by Harding and Matthews in a manner absolutely at variance the one with the other. AN EXPERT ON HAIR. Nothing could point more strongly to the guilt of Ross than satisfactory proof that hairs from the head of the murdered girl were found on a blanket in his private room. It becomes necessary, therefore, to examine Mr. Price’s evidence, to see whether it does establish this important fact. It will be seen by a reference to that evidence, that Mr. Price uses very guarded language. He “came to a conclusion” about certain things and he “formed the conclusion” about others, but he at no time definitely stated that the hairs taken from the blankets were from the same head as the hairs in the envelope. None the less, the fact cannot be blinked that the tendency of Mr. Price’s evidence was in that direction, or that in that direction lay the bent of his mind. A word of caution as to expert evidence generally may, therefore, appropriately be given, and if a quotation from “Taylor on Evidence” is selected, no one who knows anything of the subject, will question the weight of the authority.