[Sidenote:  Observation is for practical purposes.]

To return to the question of what observation is for:—­It would really seem as if some had considered it as its own end, as if detection, not cure, was their business; nay more, in a recent celebrated trial, three medical men, according to their own account, suspected poison, prescribed for dysentery, and left the patient to the poisoner.  This is an extreme case.  But in a small way, the same manner of acting falls under the cognizance of us all.  How often the attendants of a case have stated that they knew perfectly well that the patient could not get well in such an air, in such a room, or under such circumstances, yet have gone on dosing him with medicine, and making no effort to remove the poison from him, or him from the poison which they knew was killing him; nay, more, have sometimes not so much as mentioned their conviction in the right quarter—­that is, to the only person who could act in the matter.

FOOTNOTES:  [1] It is a much more difficult thing to speak the truth than people commonly imagine.  There is the want of observation simple, and the want of observation compound, compounded, that is, with the imaginative faculty.  Both may equally intend to speak the truth.  The information of the first is simply defective.  That of the second is much more dangerous.  The first gives, in answer to a question asked about a thing that has been before his eyes perhaps for years, information exceedingly imperfect, or says, he does not know.  He has never observed.  And people simply think him stupid.

The second has observed just as little, but imagination immediately steps in, and he describes the whole thing from imagination merely, being perfectly convinced all the while that he has seen or heard it; or he will repeat a whole conversation, as if it were information which had been addressed to him; whereas it is merely what he has himself said to somebody else.  This is the commonest of all.  These people do not even observe that they have not observed, nor remember that they have forgotten.

Courts of justice seem to think that anybody can speak “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” if he does but intend it.  It requires many faculties combined of observation and memory to speak “the whole truth,” and to say “nothing but the truth.”

“I knows I fibs dreadful; but believe me, Miss, I never finds out I have fibbed until they tells me so,” was a remark actually made.  It is also one of much more extended application than most people have the least idea of.

Concurrence of testimony, which is so often adduced as final proof, may prove nothing more, as is well known to those accustomed to deal with the unobservant imaginative, than that one person has told his story a great many times.

I have heard thirteen persons “concur” in declaring that fourteenth, who had never left his bed, went to a distant chapel every morning at seven o’clock.