The LORD ADVOCATE replied at some length. After complimenting the learned counsel who had just concluded, on the able manner in which he had opened the objections submitted to the consideration of the Court, he stated that he thought them ill-founded. His learned friend mixed up two objections altogether different. His first objection was to bringing two prisoners to trial in the same indictment, and his second to charging three different crimes in that indictment. He would deal very shortly with the first. The woman was charged as having been concerned with the man in one of the three murders. And this was sanctioned by the law of the land. He put her in the indictment that she might _not_ be prejudiced. If she had been put into a separate indictment, the public would have known the whole evidence before she had been put upon her trial, and the prisoner would have had the best possible reason to complain. This would have been the case had he first brought the man to trial, and afterwards the woman, adducing against her the same, or nearly the same evidence, which had previously been adduced against the man. It was to obviate this, and to prevent her from being prejudiced, that he had put her in the same indictment. “God forbid,” said his Lordship, “that any person holding the situation I do, should do any thing to prejudice a prisoner on his trial.” The very contrary motive had guided him; but if he proceeded not against the woman to-day, he would ten days hence, when she could not insist on that which she now says will prejudice her. Nor, in a case of this sort, would he be restrained from doing his duty to the country by any consideration founded upon what were called the interests of science. It was enough for him that a great crime had been committed; a crime unheard of before in any civilized country: that the public mind had in consequence become strongly agitated; and that the duty he owed to the country left him no alternative. He was determined therefore to probe and sift the whole matter to the bottom; nothing should deter him from doing so; and he repeated, that if he was compelled to desert the diet against this woman now, he would infallibly bring her to trial ten days hence. Then she would find whether she had been prejudiced by the whole evidence in this case having gone abroad to the world.