It is enough for the jury to receive the law from the bench: They may indeed determine this for themselves; but of facts they are ever the uncontroulable judges. They ought therefore to receive the facts from the mouths of the witnesses themselves, and implicitly from no other: Unless the jury particularly attend to this, they may be in danger of being misled by persons who would be far from doing it with design: For instance, if one should swear that A being foreworn’d against it, levell’d his gun and kill’d B: and afterwards it should be forgot, that the witness also swore that A immediately advanc’d & push’d his bayonet at C, which pass’d between his waistcoat and his skin; if this I say should be forgot, and should be overlook’d by the jury when they are together, perhaps instead of bringing it in murder according to the rules of the law laid down by the bench, they would bring it in manslaughter--I do not here affirm that this has ever been a fact: I mention it as what may hereafter be a fact, and to show the necessity of a jury’s relying upon facts as they receive them from the witnesses themselves, and from them alone. The furor brevis which we have heard much of, the fury of the blood which the benignity of the law allows for upon sudden provocation, is suppos’d to be of short duration--the shooting a man dead upon the spot, must have stopp’d the current in the breast of him who shot him, if he had not been bent upon killing--an attempt to stab a second person immediately after, infers a total want of remorse at the shedding of human blood; and such a temper of mind afterwards discovers the rancorous malice before, especially if it be proved that the same man had declated that he would never miss an opportunity so to do: If this does not imply malice at first, I do not see but he might have gone on stabbing people in his furor brevis, till he had kill’d an hundred; and after all, it might have been adjudg’d, in indulgence to the human passions, excuseable homicide.