The principles of these precedents do not in the least affect any case of evidence which your Managers had to support.  The paucity and inapplicability of instances of this kind convince your Committee that the Lords have ever used some latitude and liberality in all the means of bringing information before them:  nor is it easy to conceive, that, as the Lords are, and of right ought to be, judges of law and fact, many cases should occur (except those where a personal viva voce witness is denied to be competent) in which a judge, possessing an entire judicial capacity, can determine by anticipation what is good evidence, and what not, before he has heard it.  When he has heard it, of course he will judge what weight it is to have upon his mind, or whether it ought not entirely to be struck out of the proceedings.

Your Committee, always protesting, as before, against the admission of any law, foreign or domestic, as of authority in Parliament, further than as written reason and the opinion of wise and informed men, has examined into the writers on the Civil Law, ancient and more recent, in order to discover what those rules of evidence, in any sort applicable to criminal cases, were, which were supposed to stand in the way of the trial of offences committed in India.

They find that the term Evidence, Evidentia, from whence ours is taken, has a sense different in the Roman law from what it is understood to bear in the English jurisprudence; the term most nearly answering to it in the Roman being Probatio, Proof, which, like the term Evidence, is a generic term, including everything by which a doubtful matter may be rendered more certain to the judge:  or, as Gilbert expresses it, every matter is evidence which amounts to the proof of the point in question.[41]

On the general head of Evidence, or Proof, your Committee finds that much has been written by persons learned in the Roman law, particularly in modern times,—­and that many attempts have been made to reduce to rules the principles of evidence or proof, a matter which by its very nature seems incapable of that simplicity, precision, and generality which are necessary to supply the matter or to give the form to a rule of law.  Much learning has been employed on the doctrine of indications and presumptions in their books,—­far more than is to be found in our law.  Very subtle disquisitions were made on all matters of jurisprudence in the times of the classical Civil Law, by the followers of the Stoic school.[42] In the modern school of the same law, the same course was taken by Bartolus, Baldus, and the Civilians who followed them, before the complete revival of literature.[43] All the discussions to be found in those voluminous writings furnish undoubtedly an useful exercise to the mind, by methodizing the various forms in which one set of facts or collection of facts, or the qualities or demeanor of persons, reciprocally influence each other; and by this course