denomination doth import, shall be guilty of felony._

_A third head under which, in this cursory account of Crown Law, I shall
range other offences that are punished capitally, are those against our
fellow subjects, and they are either committed against their lives,
their goods or their habitations. With respect to those against life, if
one person kill another without any malice aforethought, then that
natural tenderness of which the Law of England is full, interposes for
the first fact, which in such a case is denominated manslaughter. Yet
there is a particular kind of manslaughter which, by the first of King
James, is made felony without benefit of clergy, and that is, where a
person shall stab or thrust any person or persons that have not any
weapon drawn (or that have not first struck the party which shall so
stab or thrust), so that the person or persons so stabbed or thrust
shall die within six months next following, though it cannot be proved
that the same was done of malice aforethought. This Act it is which is
commonly called the Statute of Stabbing._

_As to murder properly so called, and taking it as a term in the English
Law, it signifies the killing of any person whatsoever from malice
aforethought, whether the person slain be an Englishman or not, and this
may not only be done directly by a wound or blow, but also by
deliberately doing a thing which apparently endangers another's life, so
that if death follow thereon he shall be adjudged to have killed him.
Such was the case of him who carried his sick father from one town to
another against his will in a frosty season. It would be too long for
this Preface, should I endeavour to distinguish the several cases which
in the eye of the Law come under this denomination; having, therefore, a
view to the work itself, I shall distinguish two points only from which
malice prepense is presumed in Law._