At any rate, if the court called in the services of such a board of medical judges to assist as amici curie in determining the defendant's condition, while their opinion would not be conclusive upon the jury, it would at least do away with the present lamentable necessity of learned men answering "yes" or "no" to a hypothetical question fifty thousand words long, when the most superficial personal examination of the accused would settle the matter definitely in their minds.

Such a procedure is in general use in Germany and other continental countries, and is likewise substantially followed in Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire.* * Another equally efficacious means of dealing with the matter would be to substitute, upon a defendant's plea of insanity, a full jury of experts--like any "special" jury--for the ordinary petit jury.
There is good reason to hope that we may soon see in all the states adequate provision for preliminary examination upon the plea of insanity, and a new test of criminal responsibility consistent with humanity and modern medical knowledge.

Even then, although murderers who indulge in popular crime will probably be acquitted on the ground of insanity, we shall at least be spared the melancholy spectacle of juries arbitrarily committing feeble-minded persons charged with homicide to imprisonment at hard labor for life, and in a large measure do away with the present unedifying exhibition of two groups of hostile experts, each interpreting an archaic and inadequate test of criminal responsibility in his own particular way, and each conscientiously able to reach a diametrically opposite conclusion upon precisely the same facts..