Q. Were you or not offended by a violent stench as you approached the dead body?
Q. Had not putrefaction considerably taken place?
Q. Does not putrefaction increase very much in the space of five or six days, in a hot summer?
A. I should think it must certainly increase.
Q. Was or not the body, in a very high state of putrefaction when you saw it?
A. Upon the shroud being removed, the body appeared to me much fairer than I expected; I expected to have seen it in a very black putrified state, but the external appearance was not quite so highly so, as I expected.
Q. You mentioned that the body was much swelled?
A. It rather put on the appearance of gangrene.
Q. I understand you have set your name to a description of certain appearances that met your eye when you examined the body—I mean your examination?
Q. Did you, or did you not, concur with Mr. Wilmer as to the appearances of the body?
Q. You set your name to that examination?
A. I did not set my name to any thing but my own examination.
Q. Wherein the appearances are particularly described?
A. They are not particularly described, there is something said about the stomach and bowels.
Q. For what purpose then did you attend there?
A. I did not know that it was necessary before a coroner’s jury to enter into the particulars; I was quite a novice in the business.
Q. Do you mean a novice in the mode of dissection.
Q. Did the account you set your name to, contain a true description of the appearances that met your eye upon the occasion?
Q. Did you ever hear or know of any poison whatever occasioning any immediate external appearances on the human body?
A. No, no immediate external appearances in the case of vegetable poisons, except what I have heard, but they have not fallen under my own knowledge.
Q. So far for the external appearance. Now I shall be glad to know whether all the appearances you speak of in the face, the protuberance of the tongue, and the lips being swelled and retracted, whether those are not all signs of putrefaction?
Q. I do not mean to give you any offence, but I beg leave to ask whether you have been much used to anatomical dissection?
A. I have been as far as persons not particularly intended for anatomical pursuits—I am not a professor of anatomy.