PREFACE. THE following trials are selected and abridged from a work consisting of 1300 closely-printed pages, by Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, a man celebrated as a judge, a legislator, and a writer. He was for many years President of the highest criminal court of Bavaria, and the penal code of that country was chiefly framed by him; his exposition of the criminal law is a text-book for the whole of Germany, where the present work, which was the last he wrote, excited great attention. For ten years Feuerbach was President of the Central Criminal Court of a province of Bavaria, containing several towns, and inhabited by half a million of souls differing in faith. In the exercise of his judicial functions many remarkable cases were brought before him, and ample opportunity was afforded him, by the form of criminal procedure in Bavaria, for the exercise of his extraordinary power of penetrating the recesses of the human heart, and of divining the secret motives of human action. In Bavaria, on the discovery of any crime, the Untersuchungs Richter (examining judge)and Feuerbach himself once filled that office, which, in fact, combines the duties of public |