This book makes no claim or pretence to be a work on criminal jurisprudence. It is offered as an endeavour to assist students to such an understanding of the rules of criminal law as will enable them to form a clear idea of the practical task which will confront the prosecution and the defence in the trial of a person accused of each specific crime dealt with in its pages. It has been written in the belief that it is impossible to satisfy every reader who may take the trouble of reading it, but also that it is the duty of the author of a text-book for beginners to present the principles of law in the simplest terms, avoiding so far as possible ambiguities of expression; and in particular when a definition has been adopted to adhere strictly to it throughout the subsequent exposition of the subject.

A legal text-book begins to run out of date so soon as it reaches the printer's hands, and in the years since 1951 there have been many new decisions and statutory enactments which have called for references to over four hundred fresh cases and some rewriting of the text. In particular the wording of the Homicide Act, 1957, has created problems which have required the retention, from the last edition, of many pages which clearer thinking on the part of the legislature would have made it possible to relegate to historical treatises and to exclude from a text-book for students who are preparing for examinations in criminal law. The result is that in order to restrict the inflation of the book it has, with regret, been found necessary to sacrifice Professor Kenny's original chapter on the Nature of a Crime, which formed Appendix I of the sixteenth edition. It is to be hoped that this will eventually be reproduced in some collection of legal essays by eminent writers of the past.

I wish to record my gratitude to Mrs E. E. Jansen and to Miss Isobel Gawler, whose skill and painstaking industry have done so much to make this and the previous edition suitable for printing.