The shady relations our adventurous zealot confesses to have established with the receiver are worthy of being noted. The conscience, moreover, of this untrammeled operator is not always too nice to deter him from encouraging his clients to accept hush-money, or, indeed, to save him now and then from pocketing a tidy reward himself to offset expenses for receiving the criminal dowry. One of the least defensible of Holmes’s practices, as it appears to the writer, is the making responsible officials of Scotland Yard parties to compromises, approval of which, if incident to real life, would unquestionably cost them their positions. Imagine, for example, a superintendent of police being complaisant enough to overlook a systematic robbery for years of the public by a fraudulent beggar, and undertaking without demur not to prosecute. Some illustrations of Holmes’s theorizing may be adduced to make good the assertion that quite as liberal a proportion of sophistry as logic is there embodied. He argues, in one case, from the circumstance of a stranger’s hat, which he submits to close inspection, not having been, as he professes to detect, brushed for weeks, that the partner of his bosom has ceased to love him. Is it the customary lot of the male to find his hat relived, where needful, of accumulations of this kind by a ministering Eve, supposing him blest with one? Still descanting upon the hat, he maintains that candles, and not gas, furnish the medium of illumination in its possessor’s dwelling, because a number of tallow stains adhere to the brim; adding the suggestion that “he walks upstairs at night probably with his hat in one hand, and a tallow candle in the other.” But why take his hat upstairs at all, or—if he were in the habit of performing this outofthe-way detail—why put it elsewhere than upon his head? Then, how would grease from the candle, held in one hand, fall on the hat, carried in the other? Again, surmising the identity of a criminal from certain traces he leaves behind, his lefthandedness is deduced from observing “that the blow (inflicted on the murdered man) was struck immediately from behind,” and exceptional height from the compass of his stride in walking. To pass unchallenged the reasoning as to lefthandedness, is not the length of a man’s pace largely a matter of idiosyncrasy—something which is not, at any rate materially, dependent upon stature? Do not very many tall men take comparatively short steps, and a good number, of less inches, cover more ground with each? Have we not, besides, experience to testify that the upper and lower halves of the human body are often largely disproportioned? On a further occasion, trying to elucidate his course of proceeding at the expense of his associate, Dr Watson, he thus deliberates: “My dear fellow, I know you well. | know the military neatness which characterizes you. You shave every morning, and in this season you shave by the sunlight; but since your shaving is less and less complete as we get further back on the left side, until it becomes positively slovenly as we get round the angle of the jaw, it is surely very clear that that side is less well illuminated than the other. I could not imagine a man of your habits looking at himself in an equal light, and being satisfied with such a result.” Was not the calculator, to be able to draw this inference, required to impart a factor into the equation which may not have represented the fact,namely, that it was his friend’s custom to face the north when pursuing this routine, so that the light would strike on the right cheek? A noteworthy instance of what strikes the writer as distinctly vulnerable argument is contained in the story entitled The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb. An hydraulic engineer, who had come from London to examine a machine, the purpose of which his employer has told him was to extract “fuller’s earth,” is from certain appearances it presents forced to the belief that it is being put to a questionable use; and on hinting this is forthwith, by way of revenge, placed underneath it; the machine—which is, in reality, employed for towing—being at the same time set in motion. A coal-oil lamp is in the room, standing well under the press. After watching, for a few seconds, the terrible engine of death proceeding on its downward course, intent upon crushing him, as he meditates, “to a shapeless pulp,” he notices a small panel being pushed backwards at one side of the room, the walls of which, it is important to know, are built of wood, though ceiling and floor are of iron. Immediate contact of the machine with the floor must be the outcome of its progress, in the absence of any metal to be impressed. The engineer miraculously escapes through this opening: and having returned to London, takes Holmes back with him, in the hope of locating the coiner’s retreat, to which he had been previously conducted blindfolded. They find the house on fire, and this is the detective’s remark to his companion: “Well, at last you have had your revenge upon them. There can be no question that it was your oil lamp which, when it was crushed in the press, set fire to the wooden walls, though no doubt they were too excited in the chase after you to observe it at the time.” Could igniting by any chance follow under the circumstances ? And, even if such were possible, would not the flame have been too momentary to allow of its extension to the walls? Where, too, would a draught sufficient to keep it alive come from?