The Art of Cross-Examination is a classic manual of courtroom advocacy, devoted to the most dramatic and perilous instrument of trial practice: the testing of testimony. Combining practical instruction with vivid anecdotes from celebrated cases, Wellman analyzes the psychology of witnesses, the discipline of questioning, and the advocate's need for patience, restraint, and strategic imagination. Its style is lucid, urbane, and empirical, standing within the Anglo-American tradition of forensic rhetoric while translating legal craft into readable literary form. Francis L. Wellman was a distinguished New York trial lawyer whose long experience in civil and criminal courts gave him unusual authority on the subject. Writing from practice rather than abstraction, he drew upon the habits of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century advocacy, when oral examination remained central to public justice. His book reflects both professional mastery and a reforming impulse: to teach lawyers that effective cross-examination depends less on theatrical aggression than on preparation, moral intelligence, and command of human behavior. This volume is recommended not only to lawyers and law students, but also to historians, writers, and readers interested in persuasion, character, and truth under pressure. It remains a penetrating guide to the courtroom mind and to the disciplined art of making facts speak.