Cock's fellow constable. The former, however, stated he saw nobody immediately after he heard the shots. A pistol has recently been found, thirty-one years after the crime, thrown into a pit on the scene of the Whalley Range murder, but in a direction opposite to that in which Peace declared he fled. .. The sequence of events after the con

fession of Peace was that Mr. Cross, then Home Secretary, stated in the House of Commons that he had felt it his duty to advise the Crown to grant a free pardon to William Habron, and that in this course he had entire concurrence of both the learned judge who tried the case and also of the law officers of the Crown.

1

128. MADELEINE SMITH'S CASE. Evidence. Amer. ed. 1905. p. 300.) 1 In a case of the deepest interest, in 1857, before the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh, a question whether or not the prisoner had the opportunity of administering arsenic to the deceased was the turning point of the case. The prisoner, a young girl of nineteen, was tried upon an indictment charging her, in accordance with the law of Scotland, with the administration to the same person of arsenic, with intent to murder, on two several occasions in the month of February, and with his murder by the same means on the 22d of March following.

(W. WILLS. Circumstantial

she should marry no other person while he lived. After the failure of her efforts to obtain the return of her letters, she resumed in her correspondence her former tone of passionate affection, assuring him that she would marry him and no one else, and denying that there was any truth in the rumors of her connection with another. She appointed a meeting on the night of the 19th of February, at her father's house, where she was in the habit of receiving his visits, after the family had retired to rest, telling him that she wished to have back her "cool letters," apparently with the intention of inducing him to believe that she remained constant in her attachment to him. In the middle of the night after that interview, at which he had taken coffee prepared by the prisoner, L'Angelier was seized with alarming illness, the symptoms of which were similar to those of poisoning by arsenic. There was no evidence that the prisoner possessed arsenic at that time, but on the 21st she purchased a large quantity, professedly for the purpose of poisoning rats, an excuse for which there was no pretense. On the night of the 22d, L'Angelier again visited the prisoner, and about eleven o'clock on the following day was seized with the same alarming symptoms as before; and on this occasion also he had taken cocoa from the hands of the prisoner. After this attack L'An[For a citation of the full report of this trial, see Appendix.]

She had returned home from a boarding school in 1853, and in the following year formed a clandestine connection with a foreigner of inferior position, named L'Angelier, whose addresses had been forbidden by her parents. Early in 1856 their intercourse assumed an unlawful character, as was shown by her letters. In the month of December following, another suitor appeared, whose addresses were accepted by her with the consent of her parents, and arrangements were made for their marriage in June. During the earlier part of this engagement, the prisoner kept up her interviews and correspondence with L'Angelier; but the correspondence gradually became cooler, and she expressed to him her determination to break off the connection, and implored him to return her letters; but this he refused to do, and declared that

129. O'BANNON v. VIGUS. [Printed post, as No. 383.]

Topic 4. Habit (Usage, Custom)

130. JAMES SULLY. The Human Mind. (1892. Vol. II, p. 224.) Habit is a product of acquisition. In this respect it differs from instinct, with which otherwise it has much in common. We say we do a thing from habit, e.g. nod back when a person not recognized nods to us, when as a consequence of long practice and frequent repetition the action has become in a measure organized, and thus shorn of some of its original appanage of full consciousness or attention. The characteristic note of habit is mechanicality. In its most forcible manifestation habitual movement approaches to a subconscious reflex, as in the case just referred to. . . . It is thus evident

that in habit we have in a particular way to do with that lapse of the intenser degrees of consciousness which accompanies an approximation of nervous structures to a state of perfect adjustment to the environment. The oft-repeated action becomes habitual and so automatic because the nervous centers engaged have taken on special modifications, have, according to the customary physiological figure, become "seamed" by special lines of discharge. The perfect fixation of a habit appears to liberate the highest cortical centers from all but the slightest measure of cooperation in the process, the greater part of the central work (transmission of a definite kind of afferent excitation into a definite path of motor discharge) being now carried out by help of stably fixed arrangements in subordinate centers. . . . The on-coming of habit is shown by two principal criteria. First of all, repetition of movement tends to remove all sense of effort and to render the movement easy. . . . In the second place, habit involves and manifests itself in a consolidation of the processes of association involved. One of the most familiar characteristics of habit is prompt succession of a movement on the recurrence of the idea of a desired object. Here the intermediate idea of the movement itself is repressed or skipped. . . . A further and more striking result of this fixing of associative connection is the coordination of particular sense presentations with appropriate motor-responses. This is illustrated in the recurring movements of everyday life, as taking out a latchkey on approaching one's door. Where this process is complete there lapses not only the initiative idea of the movement, but even the idea of procurable object. Thus when a man automatically winds up his watch on taking it out of his pocket during the operation of dressing for dinner, the action seems to be wanting in all ideational initiation. .

Habit and Chains of Movement. As we saw when dealing with the process of association, series of movements tend by repetition to grow consolidated, so that each step calls up the succeeding ones without a distinct intervention of consciousness. Simple examples of this are to be found in the series of movements involved in walking, dressing, and undressing, in playing a piece of music from memory, reciting a familiar poem, and so forth. Such chains of movement approximate in their lack of clear consciousness, their mechanical regularity, and promptness of succession to the motor sequences in breathing, and other primarily automatic movements. What differentiates such habitual chains from primarily automatic successions is the initial volitional impulse. I must consciously and voluntarily start the walking, the dressing, and so forth. But the start is all, so far as volition is concerned. The succession then takes care of itself, and, what is more, is carried out better for the non-intervention of attention.

...

Degrees of Habitual Coördination. It follows from our general definition of the principle, that habit shows itself in very unlike degrees of strength. The process of organic attachment is more or less complete in the case of different movements. We may now glance at these differences in the strength of habit, and seek to determine their conditions. We may estimate the prompting force of habit in more ways than one. The obvious index to its influence is lapse of physical initiation as seen in the swiftness of the motor response. All the popular examples of habit, as the story of the victimized soldier who dropped his dinner at the word "Attention!”

shouted by some practical jokers, illustrate this feature. The swifter the response to a particular sense stimulus, the more of force of habit is there indicated. Another criterion is specialty or precision of response.. The soldier's loss of his dinner was due to the unerring precision of the habitual reaction, the swift dropping of the arms into the vertical line on the recurrence of the customary signal. The stronger the habit, the more definite or exact will be the response. Another measure of strength of habit closely connected with the preceding is uniformity, or unfailingness of response whenever the proper stimulus occurs. This criterion, together with speciality or definiteness, gives to habit its unvarying and monotonous character, its resemblance to the actions of a machine, and to those lower nervous reflexes which come nearest to mechanical actions. Lastly, the strength of a habit is directly measurable in terms of the difficulty of modify ing it by special volitional effort. Half-formed habits can be easily altered; wholly formed, only by dint of extraordinary volitional effort. Employing such criteria, we can draw up a scale of habitual movement. . . . The main conditions on which these varying degrees of habit depend appear to be the following: (1) The amount of time and attention given to the particular movement or combination of movements so as to make it our own. Since habit is superinduced on a volitional process, it is evident that the action must first be perfectly acquired through a conscious process of acquisition. (2) The frequency with which the particular stimulus has been followed by the particular movement. This condition, repetition, or frequency of performance, is the great determinate of strength of habit. (3) The unbroken uniformity of past responses. By this is meant that a particular stimulus S should have always been followed by a particular motor reaction M, not sometimes followed, at other times not, or followed by another sort of movement, as M'. This condition evidently goes to determine the degree of unfailingness, as also of specialization in the habit. Thus, children who are sometimes required to do a certain thing by their parents, but now and again allowed to intermit the action, never acquire perfect habits.

131. HANS GROSS. Criminal Psychology. (1911. transl. Kallen, § 28, p. 158.) We have yet to ask what is meant by "rule" and what its relation is to probability. Scientifically "rule" means law subjectively taken, and is of equal significance with the guiding line for one's own conduct, whence it follows that there are only rules of art and morality, but no rules of nature. Usage does not imply this interpretation. We say that as a rule it hails only in the daytime; by way of exception, in the night also; the rule for the appearance of whales indicates that they live in the Arctic Ocean; a general rule indicates that bodies that are especially soluble in water should dissolve more easily in warm than in cold water, but salt dissolves equally well in both. Again we say: As a rule the murderer is an unpunished criminal; it is a rule that the brawler is no thief and vice versa; the gambler is as a rule a man of parts, etc. We may say, therefore, that regularity is equivalent to customary recurrence and that whatever serves as rule may be expected as probable. If, i.e. it be said, that this or that happens as a rule, we may suppose that it will repeat itself this time. It is not permissible to expect more. But it frequently happens that we mistake rules