produced in the police court _was_ the Bott violin was August M.
Gemunder, and his testimony upon the trial before Recorder Goff is
worthy of careful examination, since the jury considered it of great
importance in reaching a verdict, even requesting that it should be
re-read to them some hours after retiring to deliberate. Gemunder
testified, in substance, that he belonged to a family which had been
making violins for three generations and had himself been making them
for twenty years, that he was familiar with Bott's Stradivarius, having
seen it three times, and that he firmly believed a large part of the
violin produced before the magistrate _was_ the missing Bott--certainly
the back and scroll. Moreover, he was able to describe the markings of
the Bott violin even to the label inside it. It should be mentioned,
however, that in the magistrate's court he had been called only to
_describe_ the Bott violin and not to _identify_ the one produced as the
Bott itself. He further swore that the violin now offered by the defense
on the trial was _not_ the one in evidence before the magistrate, but
was one which he had sold some years before to one Charles Palm.

The defense, on the other hand, called among its witnesses John P.
Frederick, a violin maker, who testified that he was familiar with the
Bott Strad. and had seen it in 1873 at Bott's house, Grenecher Castle,
in Germany; that he had repaired it in this country in 1885; that the
instrument in court was not a Strad. nor even a good imitation of one,
and, of course, was not the "Duke of Cambridge," but that it _was_ the
identical instrument produced before the magistrate, and one which he
recognized as having been sent him for repair by Charles Palm in 1885.

Thus both sides agreed that the fiddle now offered in evidence was a
bogus Strad. once belonging to a man named Palm, the only element of
conflict being as to whether or not the violin which Flechter had