In the last few months of holding office in India, Erskine Perry, judge in India, employed some of his leisure hours in collecting a few cases of general interest that had come to him in the Supreme Court of Bombay. This book is an outcome of it. He felt that the insight into human life afforded by transactions in a court of justice gives an opportunity to study the national character, especially to the English administrators in India who were so severed from the bulk of the Indian people by colour, race, language, religion and material interest. The motives, reasonings, and action of the Indians displayed in broad daylight, he felt, would be an inestimable advantage in the administration of justice.