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TRIM. OF JOHN W. WEBSTER. 223
Medical College, there is not the slightest remnant or trace of anything
but of a naked dead body,-if there is nothing that can indicate the
presence of any garment with which it was olothed,-if the sudden aberra-
tion of mind of Dr. Parkman is not an unreasonable assumption,-if there
are manifest though inexplicable indications that an unknown agent
clandestinely visited the apartments assigned to the professor of chemis-
try, I submit to you if it be any extravagant or visionary theory which
suggests to you, that he wandered away, he knew not where; that he
sunk under some of those sudden visitations which terminate human
life, or fell into the violent hands of bold bad men, who deprived him of
it; and that, when all was over, his property was plundered, and his
naked dead body conveyed within the walls of the College, and secretly
concealed where its parts were found. You are the judges; and, upon
all these facts and circumstances and probabilities, your judgment is
seriously and solemnly to be passed. They cannot be disguised from your
observation; they cannot be discarded from your reflections. And if they
constitute the basis of a reasonable hypothesis,-and if the circumstantial
evidence of the prosecution does not, to a moral certainty, exclude you
from its adoption, then though it may not wholly satisfy your minds,--
though it may not entirely relieve the prisoner at the bar from the
painful suspicions which untoward circumstances have excited, it will
still be sufficient to create a reasonable doubt, and, under the laws of
the land, at least secure him from a verdict of conviction.
I must now ask your attention to a portion of the evidence of the
Government which has been thought, and rightly thought, to be not
of conclusive, but of serious and material importance. I allude to the
testimony of Ephraim L ittlefield. I regret that my duty compels me
to enter upon an investigation of the credibility of this witness, and
of the consequences which are to be deduced from his testimony, because
I am not insensible that the tendency of such an examination is even
more than to point a suspicion towards him as the perpetrator of that
crime which is charged against the prisoner at the bar. But you must
not misunderstand me. I do not assume to impute any homicide to him.
I will take upon myself no such fearful responsibility in upholding the
defence which now rests upon me as that. I leave that responsibility
with the officers of the Government to whom it belongs. But it is my duty
to examine, and it is yours tp weigh the testimony of this witness; and
if there be anything which tends to disparage it,-anything which is
sufficient to crush it, yon are bound to give the uttermost effect to those
considerations, whatever may be the consequences.
The importance to the Government of the testimony of Mr. Little-
field, I do not misapprehend or deny; nor do I fail to appreciate the
difficulties it imposes upon the defence. Its general tendency is to show,
that Dr. Webster had the sole and exclusive possession of the apart-
ments occupied by him in the Medical College: that he effectually secured
them against the access of all persons from without; that his agency in
everything pertaining to the remains discovered within and beneath the
laboratory was direct and constant: and thereby to diminish the prob-
ability and reasonableness of that hypothesis of the defence which sug-
gests the intervention of an unknown agent to whom everything in
relation to those remains may be attributed.
You are to consider and determine what weight shall be given to the
testimony of Mr. Littlefield, and what abatement shall be made from
it. He is in some unimportant particulars' corroborated by others. Mr.
Sawin, the express-man from Cambridge, testifies that previous to the
?6th of November, though he had often carried things from Cambridge
to Boston for Dr. Webster, he never found the rooms so fastened that
he could not enter them. Upon that occasion, he says, that Dr. Webster
told him to leave the articles he carried, in the entry, and that he would
take them in. When he carried them there, however, he tried the door
of the laboratory, and found it locked; and that be looked for the key,
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